


Deep Roots Are Not Reached by the Frost

by groveofbones



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Developing Friendships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mando and Friends Accidentally Save the Galaxy, Team as Family, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:42:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29068998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groveofbones/pseuds/groveofbones
Summary: Several months after the storming of Gideon's ship, Din is still unsure what to do next. Then the Jedi he'd never expected to hear from again offers him a job: find a mysterious and deadly Imperial agent. But the more he finds out about his target, the more he realizes that the remnants of the Empire have something much bigger planned.
Relationships: Din Djarin & Boba Fett, Din Djarin & Cara Dune, Din Djarin & Cobb Vanth, Din Djarin & Fennec Shand, Din Djarin & Greef Karga, Din Djarin & Migs Mayfeld
Comments: 44
Kudos: 81





	1. Chapter 1

When it came right down to it, Din hated his new ship. It rattled in parts he expected to be silent, and it was silent in parts that he expected to rattle. It juddered strangely on takeoff but not at high speeds, so he compensated when he didn’t need to and failed to when he did. The hold was a strange shape, the cockpit was a strange shape, the pilot’s seat was uncomfortable, his hands kept automatically drifting to the wrong parts of the control panel.

He hated his new ship, and he hated that it wasn’t the Razor Crest.

But it flew, and that was… something. He was grateful to Karga for finding it for him, and for letting him take it on credit that Din had a sneaking, uncomfortable suspicion would never be called in. The new ship had flown him away from Nevarro, and had flown him elsewhere, too. 

He couldn’t quite remember where all he’d been; he’d told Karga he was going to find some work, and he’d made a half-hearted attempt, but he’d mostly just… drifted. He jumped from planet to planet, and from city to city, and from town to town, and everywhere he went he asked if anyone had seen or heard of any Mandalorians, and everywhere he went the answer was no.

He would find work. He would find something to do. When the time was right. When his rations and fuel ran out.

It didn’t even take him that long, though, before he found his new ship flying him back to Nevarro again. As good a place as any. One where he could pick up some information. One where he could get a sense of how things were in the galaxy.

One where he knew people.

As good a place as any.

His new ship, regardless of how easy it was to hate it, brought him back to his almost-home and set him down in the shipyard with no problems. Karga was there waiting for him, arms crossed, Cara next to him. They grinned at him when he stepped off the ship, concern under the expression. They were concerned about him. Of course. He supposed that whole scene aboard Gideon’s ship had been a bit pitiful. He tried not to let it get to him.

“Mando!” Karga said, clapping a hand on Din’s shoulder. “You’re a sight for sore eyes. How’s the ship working out for you?”

“Functional,” Din answered shortly. “How’re things here?”

“Functional,” Cara cut in. Din noticed that the badge of the New Republic was still pinned to her shoulder, and next to it there was another one, a silver and bronze circle showing a star with a leafy crown wrapped around it. Cara saw him looking and her grin got wider, her chest puffing out with pride. “It’s a Republic special commendation,” she said, tapping it. “For bringing in Gideon.”

Din smiled under the safety of his helmet. “Least they could do,” he said.

“Yeah, well, it really was the least,” Karga grumbled. “They didn’t send anyone to back her up, she’s still the only Marshal on Nevarro.”

Cara shrugged. “They’re stretched thin at the moment. Why, you think I can’t handle Nevarro on my own?” She elbowed Karga in the side. “Besides, they did send me a few new toys. New Republic standard, apparently. You should see them, Mando, they’re pretty fancy.”

“I’ll stop in, you can give me the tour,” Din answered. “Look, I’m just here to lay low, pick up some leads.”

“Course you are,” Karga said, gesturing him out of the shipyard, toward the streets of the city. “I got you rooms at the inn. First round’s on me.”

***

One day became two became three, and before he knew it, he’d been on Nevarro, in the same town as always, for a little over a week. The days seemed to slip together, and he still wasn’t sure what he’d do next. His decision-making powers had never deserted him that way before, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do to make his mind work properly again.

He wished he could speak to the Armorer again. He wished he could find the Covert bustling with life, rather than empty and still. He wished the noises of the town would become the sounds of the Razor Crest, and of…

He didn’t finish the thought. He wished a lot of things that were useless and impossible, and he paced his rented room in circles, and he sometimes walked the streets of the city and sometimes visited Cara and mostly did nothing at all.

At least Cara seemed genuinely happy to see him. She told him that most of her day in the Marshal’s office was boring and she’d welcome the company. He sat in the chair across her desk from her and listened to her talk about anything that came into her mind, mostly about Nevarro but sometimes about the wider galaxy.

“They haven’t said anything official,” she said one day, a slight frown on her face, “but I get the feeling that people above my pay grade are worried about something in the Outer Rim. I keep getting messages from the Core Worlds saying that us Marshals out here are important and need to keep our eyes open.”

Din considered that for a moment. “You reported the lab on Nevarro? What they were doing with…” He stopped himself, changed direction. “What they were doing there and on Gideon’s ship?”

“Yeah,” Cara said, and she was watching him closely, as if looking for the reaction under the helmet. He didn’t think about it too closely. “Well,” Cara went on, with a shrug, “they’ll tell me what they’ll tell me. At least they trust me to take care of things here.”

It was pleasant, sitting for a while in Cara’s office, comfortable, even, but he couldn’t keep it going for long. Restlessness would build under his skin, and he’d take his leave, walk around until he made it back to his room, and then he’d pace in circles again until something drove him out of his head.

It was an unsustainable life, but he couldn’t seem to do anything to change it. It was almost a relief, therefore, when Karga, catching him walking on the street outside the cantina one day, the ninth after he’d come to Nevarro, told him that someone wanted to talk to him.

“A job?” Din asked automatically.

“Could be,” Karga answered, a slight frown on his face. “Didn’t say, just wanted to talk to you specifically. Asked for a private room.” He pointed toward one of the rooms at the back of the cantina.

“Give a name?”

“Nothing.”

Din considered it for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ll see what he wants.”

“Call if you need anything,” Karga said, with a significant look at a couple of men at the bar who were obviously Karga’s bodyguards. Din didn’t know whether to be exasperated or grateful that Karga was apparently determined to look out for him.

Din shouldered his way through the crowd in the cantina and stepped through the door into the private room before he could second-guess himself. Could be some ex-Imperial, wanting revenge. Could be someone who’d picked up a bounty on the kid and wanted to extract information. Could be a lot of things. No way to know, so no reason to hesitate.

He shut the door behind him and took stock of the person in front of him, leaning back in the booth with their feet up on the table. Plain shirt, trousers, and boots, plain blaster holstered on a plain belt, and a scratched helmet with full face mask, only a slit for the eyes left uncovered.

So, trying not to be recognized. Maybe they had a reputation on Nevarro.

“You the Mando?” the stranger said, their voice crackling through a modulator that rendered it completely distorted.

“I’m a Mando,” Din answered, sliding himself into the booth across from the stranger. “Might be the one you’re looking for.”

The stranger leveled a long look at him, then shook their head. “That armor still gives me the creeps,” they said, and took their feet off the table. They reached up and pulled off their helmet, setting it down on the table and giving Din an expectant look.

Din ran over the new information in his mind: Human. Male-presenting. Probably about Din’s own age. Clean-shaven, brown hair flattened from the helmet. There was something slightly familiar about the stranger, but, as he couldn’t quite place where he’d seen the face before, he judged it irrelevant.

“Sorry about the mask,” the man said with a shrug. “Wanted to get in and out without being mobbed.”

So, a recognizable face on Nevarro. Must be in some field that didn’t overlap with bounty hunting, though, or Din would have been better able to place him. “You needed something?” he asked.

“Just to be clear,” the man said, leaning his elbows on the table and squinting at Din, “you’re the Mando that had a bit of business with Luke Skywalker six months or so ago?”

Din’s blood did a complicated thing where it ran cold and then blazed hot. “What’s happened?” Din asked, voice gone flat and harsh. He had half-stood, he realized, his hand hovering over his blaster.

The man raised one hand, palm out as though to placate him, although Din didn’t fail to notice that his other hand was over his own blaster. “Nothing, the kid’s fine, I swear. This has nothing to do with him.”

Din relaxed slowly, by degrees, until he was sitting again, his hands on the table. The jagged pulse of dread took a little longer to drain away. He cocked his head at the man, narrowing his eyes behind his helmet. “So what does it have to do with?” he asked.

“The New Republic,” the stranger answered, with a bit of a shrug. “Luke asked me to track you down and give you a message.”

On a first-name basis with that Jedi. Din filed that away. “I don’t have any business with the New Republic,” he said shortly.

“It’s just a message,” the man answered, and slid a holo recording across the table toward him. “Not an obligation.”

“But he does have a job that needs doing?” Din pressed, not reaching for the recording.

The stranger nodded shortly. “He does. And the New Republic will pay for it to get done.”

“Why me?” The Jedi probably had access to more resources than just a bounty hunter, however good that bounty hunter was, and the New Republic certainly did. 

The man smiled and leaned back in the booth again. “Your kid speaks very highly of you, apparently.”

Another alternating flash of cold and hot traveled through Din’s body, and he was very glad of his helmet. A slightly alarming lump formed in his throat, and he reached for the recording and turned it over and over in one hand to gain himself a bit of time to get rid of it. Finally, he said, “I’ll watch the message. No guarantees.”

“I didn’t ask for any,” the stranger said, and he picked his helmet up off the table and stood. He headed for the door, leaving Din at the table, staring at the recording and feeling utterly bewildered. “Hey,” the man said, hesitating with his hand on the door controls. Din looked up sharply, wondering whether he’d need to reach for his blaster.

“What is it?” he asked, placing his hand on the edge of the table, ready to push himself to his feet.

If the stranger noticed his tension, he didn’t mention it. He wasn’t even looking at Din, just staring down into the fact mask of his helmet. “You sent your kid with Luke, to train?” he asked, his voice missing the bravado it had carried at the table.

“I did,” Din ground out, feeling as though he had to force the words.

After a moment, the stranger asked, “Do you regret it?”

Din’s hands clenched into fists without his permission, and he had to unclench his jaw to answer. “It was where he belonged.”

The man opened his mouth as though to say something else, then abruptly pushed the helmet back onto his head and left the room.

Din sat for a long minute, looking at the holo recording, before he finally reached out and triggered the playback. The figure of the Jedi, the hood of his robe down across his shoulders and his hands tucked into his sleeves, appeared, flickering blue above the disk of the machine. Din was not ready for the response the sight provoked: a feeling like he’d been punched in the chest. He had to mentally scramble not to remember the last time he’d seen Luke Skywalker.

“To the Mandalorian of Clan Djarin,” the message began, and Din’s hand shot out and paused the recording. He took a deep breath in, out, another, another.

_ Clan Djarin _ . As far as there was such a thing, there was only one other member.  _ You are a clan of two. Your kid speaks very highly of you, apparently _ .

Din had to squeeze his eyes shut, swallow several times, and sit very still for a very long moment. Finally, when he had a handle on himself again, he reached out and started the recording again.

“To the Mandalorian of Clan Djarin. I am sending this message to you in hopes that you will help me and the New Republic. The Empire, for all the victories we’ve achieved, may not be entirely defeated, as you yourself have seen. The New Republic has been trying to gain information about its plans, but has so far been unsuccessful. I think, given what I now know about your skills and your experience, that you might have more luck. This recording contains coordinates for the last known base of operations of an Imperial agent known as Slate. We believe that Slate is behind several suspicious deaths of New Republic citizens, and was in contact with Moff Gideon before his capture. You would do the New Republic a very important service if you would find out everything you can about this agent, their plans, and their current location. I understand that your interests are not the same as those of the New Republic, but I hope that you will take on this task. It may mean the difference between life and death for many.” The Jedi paused, and glanced to the side at something out of the recording’s view, a slight smile on his face. He turned back to the recording. “Grogu is well, and his training is progressing.” The recording ended.

For a very long time, Din found himself completely unable to move, his mind blank. Just the mention of Grogu’s name had forced all his thoughts out of his head. Finally, he reached out slowly and took the recording off the table, slipping it into a pocket at his belt. Then he stood up and made his way out of the room and out of the cantina entirely, moving as if through a fog.

***

“Wait, describe the guy again,” Cara said intently, leaning forward across her desk. Din did so, putting in all the details he could remember. When he’d finished, Cara closed her eyes, took a deep breath in and out through her nose, then opened her eyes again and typed something into her computer. She flipped the screen around so that he could see. “Is this him?”

Din cocked his head at the screen, showing some kind of official image from the New Republic. “That’s him.”

Cara threw up her hands and made a long, wordless sound of utter frustration. “Dank farrik! You met Han fucking Solo and you didn’t even realize it?!”

The name was even more familiar than the face. Din furrowed his brow behind his helmet, thinking. “Rebellion fighter,” he said.

“Rebellion  _ hero _ ,” Cara corrected. “He helped destroy both Death Stars!”

“Good to know,” Din answered.

Cara shook her head. “I can’t know you. I  _ cannot _ know you. First you ask Luke Skywalker if he’s a Jedi, now this.”

“Only one of us went out from the Covert at a time,” Din said, a little stung. “I didn’t leave until after the Empire fell.”

“Literally living under a rock,” Cara grumbled, turning her screen back toward herself. “Well, if Skywalker’s right, ‘fell’ might not be the right word.” Cara wrinkled her nose and frowned, her eyes darting around the office, toward the door and the street beyond. “Fuck, if I didn’t have to be here...” She trailed off, sounding wistful.

“I’ll call you if there’s any Imperial heads to be cracked.”

“Thanks, Mando.” Cara leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Take care of yourself out there.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who's been reading! I'm writing several chapters ahead of where I'm posting, and will be updating weekly on Fridays.

Din had time to think about his ship on his several-hour hyperspace journey, and he supposed, grudgingly, that it wasn’t so bad, as ships went. It was a little bigger than the Razor Crest, with a bunk that was a real room, rather than a storage compartment he’d built a bed in. The ‘fresher had a sonic shower, and there was even a canteen that he’d filled with instant rations and packets of caf. Karga could have done worse by him. 

He’d even managed to fit the silver ball from the Razor Crest to one of the levers on the new ship’s control panel. Above it, he’d hung a little ceramic charm with the silhouette of the mountains of Nevarro painted onto it, the kind of silly souvenir he’d thought was only sold on Core Worlds. Cara had given it to him before he’d left. “So you remember to come back and tell me the whole story,” she’d said, and grinned. It gave him something to look at, on the otherwise dull flight.

The ship wasn’t so bad. It really wasn’t, all things considered.

It wasn’t the ship that he wanted to be on, though.

_ Sorry for hating you, ship _ , he thought to himself as the lights of hyperspace receded and made way for the view of the stars from the Jakku system. He took back the controls and piloted the ship on a course past the main planet of the system, toward the lonely little ball a couple of hundred million miles further from the sun.

Din had never been to the planet Nastrond, but he’d been to plenty like it. Since it orbited the same star as Jakku, it had become an anything-goes shore leave destination for the Imperial officers and soldiers stationed at the Observatory on its neighbor planet. Its inhabitants made their livings by catering to whatever the visitors’ needs were, and now that the Empire was gone, it had sunk into abject poverty, the same way Jakku itself had.

It was a story repeated over and over again in the outer systems of the galaxy. Din had never been to Nastrond, but he might as well have; he’d seen so many just like it.

The coordinates the Jedi had given him took him to a town near the boundary of the dark side of the tidal-locked planet, just at the edge of the inhabitable parts of the world. Sweeping over it on his approach, he saw an outer ring of decaying buildings, neon signs unlighted, that must have once been casinos or brothels or whatever else the Imps had needed. Now they were abandoned, and the remaining population seemed to have huddled into the center of town.

Din set his still-nameless ship down a few miles outside of the town and out of sight behind a low ridge. Then he checked his armor, blaster, and gear and made his way down the gangway and after his bounty.

Jakku was a desert world, if he remembered correctly, but Nastrond was quite a bit colder and darker. What vegetation there was was scrubby and low-growing, and the few animals he caught glimpses of were stocky and amply furred, watching him with enormous, wary eyes. His eyes tracked them behind his helmet, but they made no move to attack.

Walking so far would normally calm him, stilling all the extraneous goings-on in his brain until he was as focused as he was during a firefight. He usually appreciated long treks for that very reason. But he’d felt restless, prickly, like he wasn’t at home in his own skin, since he’d received the holo recording, since he’d had those old wounded places reopened. The walk didn’t help, and by the time the outermost buildings of the town came into view, Din was frustrated and tense.

He didn’t let it show as he entered the town. He didn’t even visibly move his head, keeping his visor straight ahead. The people of this town would be desperate, and he’d dealt with desperate people before. A show of confidence could deter many of them, and those that it didn’t deter could be lulled into false confidence.

With flicks of his eyes, he switched between his regular view and the infrared view in his visor. There were people in the surrounding buildings, splotches of darker color, and they seemed to be watching him from concealment, but none of them were moving. All of them were just watching.

Stares he could handle. He kept his pace even. 

There wasn’t much of the center of town for him to try to navigate; the actual population, those that weren’t squatting in the crumbling remains of the outlying buildings, occupied a few blocks of houses, their windows small and their walls thick to keep out the cold. People made themselves known in the center of town, though, opening their doors and coming out of their houses to stare suspiciously at him as he passed.

He noted a little group of four people coming down the street toward him, stumbling and eyes unfocused, and headed in the direction they’d come from. At the end of the street was a taller building, probably four floors, with a grand front entrance that had been boarded up. The windows on the upper floors were dark, and some were broken; the only light was coming from around the edges of a side door. It had once probably been a hotel; now all that was left was the bar, serving whatever inhabitants of the town had credits to pour down their throats.

He pushed open the door and was greeted by shocked silence that quickly turned unfriendly. There were eleven people in the bar, including the woman behind it. Four were staring straight at him, and the rest, including the bartender, were keeping an eye on him while pretending to stare into their glasses. 

Well, no weapons had been drawn, so the situation wasn’t spiraling. Yet. 

He made his way to the bar and settled himself on one of the stools. He reached into the pouch at his belt and pulled out a handful of mixed credits, some Imperial and some Republican; he wasn’t entirely sure which would be most valuable to the townspeople. He kept his hand over them as he set them down on the counter, but let them clack together, so that the bartender would know that there were plenty of them.

“You want something?” the bartender muttered, keeping her head down and scrubbing angrily at the glass she was cleaning.

“Hoping to learn a bit of the lay of the land,” Din answered, and moved his hand away so that she could count the credits he’d set down.

She froze, then carefully set down the glass. She looked at the credits for a long moment, then looked up at him, narrowing her eyes. “What do you want to know?” she asked, dropping her voice even lower.

“I’m looking for anyone coming here from offworld,” Din answered.

The bartender hesitated a long moment, then said, no longer muttering, speaking at a normal volume, “Hasn’t been anyone here from offworld in a year. Probably more. Used to be people would come here all the time, but…” She shrugged. “Things change.” As she spoke, she tried to keep her eyes on Din’s, but she couldn’t keep them from darting back and forth, scanning over the thin crowd assembled in the bar. Din didn’t turn around to look, but he imagined they were all looking down, now. No one spoke up to contradict her. 

Lying, then.

Din cocked his head, made a show of considering her words. “Anything out of the ordinary happen recently?” he asked.

The woman shook her head. “Nothing happens here,” she said, with what was probably very genuine bitterness.

Din stared her down for another moment, then swept half the credits across the bar to her with the backs of his fingers. The rest he scooped up and replaced in his belt pouch. The bartender’s eyes hardened for a moment, her mouth thinning in irritation, but she swept the credits off the bar and out of sight quickly enough. Then she picked up the glass she’d been cleaning and set to it again, studiously avoiding looking at Din.

Din stood and made his way back to the door. Once it had closed behind him, he glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then ducked to the back of the building. He picked a second-floor window with a big jagged hole in the plex and shot his grappling cord at the sill. A few seconds later, he was tucked into the window frame, knocking aside the last of the broken plex and ducking into the building.

He moved carefully through the building, testing each step before he put his weight on it, trying to avoid any place where the floor might creak, but the floor was surprisingly solid for such a run-down building. It had been made well, in its day. He estimated where the bar had been and stretched himself out on the floor over that spot, setting a sonic scanner on the floor and tuning the transmitter in his helmet to its frequency. He fiddled with the settings until the sounds of the bar below suddenly snapped into clarity in his ear.

The bar was no longer silent; he could hear muffled muttering from several different directions. He’d chosen his place well; he could hear the clinking of the glasses as the bartender moved them around. All he had to do was wait.

He didn’t have to wait long. After a few moments, he heard footsteps coming up to the bar, and a low voice muttered, “Leshi, we have to talk about this.”

“Nothing to talk about,” the bartender, Leshi, answered. “Just a bounty hunter, looking for someone. He won’t stick around now that he knows there’s nothing for him here.” Her voice was hard, pointed.

“But he could be here about…” the other voice began.

Leshi cut him off. “Shut up,” she said, her voice flat. A long silence fell between them, broken only by the nervous shifting of someone’s booted feet. Finally, Leshi continued, “I’ll talk to you in the alley out back. Five minutes.”

The nervous steps moved away. Din stayed where he was until he heard Leshi’s footsteps moving out from behind the bar, toward the back of the building. Then he stood and picked his way, just as carefully, back to the window he’d entered through. He hunched next to the window, raising himself just enough to look out, and waited.

There was a skinny man with dark circles under his eyes already waiting in the alley. As Din watched, he pulled a death stick out of his pocket and fiddled with it with shaking hands, before losing his grip and dropping it. He muttered something to himself and bent to pick it up, struggling with it for another moment before the blue indicator light went on and he stuck the end of it in his mouth.

A door opened in the back wall of the building, and Leshi stepped out. As soon as the door was closed behind her, she hissed, “You’re a fucking idiot, Kol.”

Kol crossed his arms, burying his still-trembling hands in his armpits, and whined, “I don’t understand why you’re not taking this seriously.”

“Seriously?” Leshi hissed back, crossing the alley in a couple of strides. Kol shrunk away from her, pressing his back into the wall behind him. “You think I’m not taking this seriously? You’re the one acting shifty where everyone can see us. You’re the one drawing attention.”

“We have to figure out what we’re going to do,” Kol continued stubbornly, not meeting Leshi’s eyes.

“We don’t have to do anything,” Leshi answered. “Like I said, he’s just a bounty hunter, poking around. Trying to find some scumbag and figured he’d check out a dump like this. He won’t be sticking around if we don’t give him any reason to.” Her voice was very sharp on the last words.

“But…” Kol took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “But what if he’s here about…” He dropped the volume of his voice and whispered, “Zekker?”

“Don’t,” Leshi shot back. “Don’t even talk about him. There’s no reason for anyone to be asking about Zekker. Who cares what happens to some townie in the wilds, anyway?”

“But the timing. You have to admit, the timing is… I mean, Zekker comes back saying the things he was, and then he gets murdered, and then a few days later this bounty hunter shows up? It’s…”

He cut off as Leshi reached out and slapped him across the face. “You. Shut. The. Fuck. Up,” she said in a dangerous whisper. “There is no reason for anyone to be asking about Zekker. And no one will, not unless we give them a reason by acting like idiots. You are going to go home, you are going to stay away from the bar for a few days, and you are not going to talk to me about this stupid shit again, you got it?” Kol nodded miserably. “Good.” With that, Leshi turned on her heel and marched stiffly back to the back door of the bar.

Kol stood still for a long moment, death stick burning through its charge in his mouth without him seeming to notice it, then he shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, ducked his head, and trudged out of the alley, looking like the unhappiest man in the galaxy. Din waited until he was out of sight, then set the end of his grappling cord and lowered himself back down to the ground.

Kol was not difficult to follow, but Din knew from experience that stealth in a shining suit of armor was not easy to maintain for any length of time. So, at the earliest opportunity, he put on a burst of speed, closed the distance between them, and dragged Kol into the shadow behind an abandoned building before the man could do more than half-turn and widen his eyes. Din shoved him against the wall of the building and clamped one hand over his mouth. “Alright,” he said, as Kol stared at him with pure terror in his eyes, “how about you tell me about Zekker?”

He watched the man’s eyes dart around, taking in the fact that there were no other people in sight. When he thought the situation had sunk in, he removed his hand from the man’s mouth and took a step back, and Kol sagged against the wall.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he said finally. “I just lent him the truck.” Din didn’t answer, just stared him down until he continued, “Are you going to kill me?”

“Hadn’t planned on it,” Din said. “Tell me about what he was saying before he was murdered.”

“Okay,” Kol said, swallowing and smoothing his hands over his shirt with quick, jerky movements. “Okay. So, yeah, so Zekker was a shadow diver, right? He went into the dark side of the planet. You can do that with the right equipment, and there’s mineral deposits that no one’s mined out yet because the big mining rigs don’t work right with the cold over there. So you can just take some hand-held tools and get enough out of the rock to live comfortable for a week or so. It’s dangerous, but people do it. Zekker wasn’t the only one who did it, there are divers all over the border.”

“What was he saying?” Din repeated, a little edge to his voice, cutting through Kol’s babbling.

“Just stupid shit. Nobody took him seriously, he was talking about having found something big in the shadow. Information he could trade for a big payday. He said he was going to borrow a holo recorder from someone the next town over, go back and get some pictures, and sell them in the capital. Everyone thought he was talking out of his ass, but he just told us to wait and see. I’d never seen him so excited.”

“And then he was murdered,” Din prompted.

“Yeah.” Koba looked down, fiddling with his hands. “Leshi came to me and said that Zekker had gotten the pictures he wanted and was headed to the capital. He wanted to borrow my truck, because he didn’t have anything that could get him there. I didn’t want to, but he said he’d pay me out of his reward.”

“Did you see the pictures?” 

Kol clenched his jaw and hunched his shoulders. “One of them,” he said reluctantly.

“And?” Din leaned in a little, cocking his head to the side and fixing Kol with a steady stare from under his visor.

Kol didn’t look at him, staring down at the ground. “There was a ship,” he said, practically whispering. “A ship taking off from the shadow side. Zekker said he’d seen more.”

“Is that unusual?”

“No one lives on the shadow side, so no one lands there. The ship was just… in the middle of nowhere. Whatever it was doing was…” He shrugged, but Din got what he meant. Anyone landing in the shadow was trying to keep their actions secret.

“When was he killed?” Din asked. “Before or after he’d been to the capital?”

“Before,” Kol answered. “He didn’t even make it halfway. Some travelers found him dead on the road, single blaster bolt to the back of the head. No sign of the truck.” Kol scuffed his toe against the ground, face crumbling in despair. “That truck was the only thing I had that was worth anything. Everyone figured that was what the killer had been after.”

Din kept his silence for a long moment, letting the tension build. Kol shut his eyes as though he was waiting for an execution. Finally, Din asked, “Is that what you think happened to him?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know, I was just the guy with the truck.” Din cocked his head slightly and waited him out. “Leshi said that it was just a robbery. Someone wanted the truck.” Din kept his silence. “I don’t know, really! But I thought… Maybe he got killed because he’s a shadow diver?”

“What do you mean?”

“Divers… They’re dying out in the shadow, and that’s not unusual, but… there’s a lot of them dying. Zekker said it was good for business, fewer people out there, but there was one from a couple of towns over, and the story we heard here was… The story we heard here was that he’d been heading for the capital, and gotten killed on the way. I just thought…” Kol trailed off.

Din crossed his arms over his chest and thought the matter over. Kol watched him surreptitiously from the corner of his eye, hugging himself against the cold and his fear. Finally, Din asked, “Did you report what happened to Zekker to someone in the capital?”

Kol shrugged. “The town headman sent a note, and the people who found him probably did, too. The headman always sends the notes in when something happens, but it’s not like anything ever gets done about it. No one from the capital ever comes out here.”

Din considered his next move. Asking the straightforward question could shock some information out of someone who wasn’t expecting it, but it could also tip off his quarry. He decided to chance it. “Have you ever heard of a person called Slate?” he asked, voice perfectly level.

Kol furrowed his brow. “Slate? No, I… I don’t think so. Should I have?”

“Have there been any offworlders around here lately?”

Kol shrugged and slumped against the wall. “Everyone always says that there are offworlders in the next town over. Or in the capital. Or out in the wilds. There’s always rumors. People just want the offworlders to come back.”

Din stared him down for a moment longer, then said, “Thank you for the information,” and ducked out of the alley.

***

The capital did have a name, although the people of Nastrond seemed to call it only “the capital”. Its name was Nith, and its little complex of government buildings, all designed according to the grand Imperial architectural style, seemed to be waging a losing battle for respectability against the rest of the city around it, which didn’t seem much different than any of the wretched hives of scum and villainy that Din had seen across the Outer Rim.

Nonetheless, the building marked Law Archives was clean and well-maintained, and the man behind the front desk was helpful after Din had given him his Guild credentials. Fifteen minutes after he had walked in the front door, he found himself in front of a terminal displaying a list of reports to the offices in Nith from the last year, all of them relating to the disappearance or suspicious death of a shadow diver from one of the border towns.

There were quite a few. Kol hadn’t been kidding when he’d said that it was dangerous work. Some of them seemed easily explained, equipment failures, a diver going out too far and not being able to get back to the sunward side in time. Some of them, however, caught his eye: those who disappeared without a trace, those whose fellow townspeople had insisted that their equipment had been tampered with. And then there were those who had been killed on the road, a single blaster bolt to the back of the head.

There were six of them, from all across the ring of the border. It was enough to be suggestive. Of course, there wasn’t any indication that the other divers had found something in the shadow, the way Zekker had, but he’d bet that there was something in that shadow that someone was trying very hard to keep hidden.

Back in his ship a while later, Din opened a transmission to Nevarro and sent his coordinates. “If you want in, rent something that’ll get you here as soon as possible,” was the message that followed. “I think I found some skulls in need of cracking.”


	3. Chapter 3

It took almost a full day for Cara to get to Nastrond. Din was waiting for her when her ship set down in the shabby shipyard in the capital. When it finally arrived, the ship was small but new-looking, with a New Republic seal stamped onto the side hatch. That side hatch banged open almost as soon as the engines had run down, and Cara jumped to the ground, not waiting for the gangway to extend.

“The New Republic shuttles you around now?” Din asked as she walked up to him, wrinkling her nose at the cold.

“Perks of the job,” she answered cheerfully. She glanced in either direction. “You really managed to find the ass-end of nowhere, didn’t you? It’s kriffing cold.”

“It’ll get colder,” Din answered, and jerked his thumb back toward the city, such as it was. “I’ll buy you breakfast and tell you about it.”

He’d gotten a room at a little inn whose proprietor was overjoyed to have a customer who wanted to stay, not just stop in for a bite to eat. He asked the owner to send a couple of bowls of soup to his room and settled in to tell Cara what he’d found.

He’d just managed to get to what he wanted to do next when the food arrived. Before Din could say anything, Cara turned her chair around, toward the wall, propping her feet up on the windowsill with her bowl in one hand and her spoon in the other.

The gesture made Din abruptly happy that she was there. It was an unexpectedly strong emotion, so he tried not to think about it too much as he took off his helmet and picked up his own bowl. He was hungrier than he’d thought.

“So your plan is to go into the shadow of the planet and poke around?” Cara asked, through a mouthful of food.

“I got us some equipment,” Din said. “We’ll be as safe as anyone else who does it, and I have an idea where to start.”

“I’m not complaining, just wondering why we aren’t just flying around it with our ships.”

“There’ve been surveys done on this planet, since the Battle of Jakku. If there’s something there, it must be well-enough hidden that looking from space won’t do us any good.”

“Fair enough. I like keeping my feet on the ground, anyway. When do we leave?”

Din smiled. “As soon as we can. Do you need to sleep?”

“I slept on the flight over. If I try to sleep any more, I’ll probably go insane.” She set her empty bowl on the ground and stretched her arms over her head. “Lead the way, Mando.”

***

The equipment for shadow divers consisted of individual pods that rattled over the ground on a gyroscopic wheel that ran around the outside. The pods were sealed against the cold and equipped with external dark-vision cameras, but they weren’t large, and Din found himself with shoulders, elbows, and knees crammed against the walls and his head slightly bowed.

“Feels like being stuck in a ration can,” Cara’s voice crackled over the com between the two pods.

Din snorted a laugh. “Pretty much.” He fired up the pod and pulled it away from the ship and out into the wilderness, heading for the line of shadow. On one of the cameras he could see Cara’s pod pulling up alongside his. It was a comforting sight.

The advantage of the pods was that they didn’t produce any external light, and given how well-sealed they were, they also didn’t produce any heat that could be seen on scans. Din half-expected an actual military base, given how well it had apparently been kept hidden, but whatever they ended up finding, they would be pretty difficult to spot, and could hopefully get close without raising any alarms.

As they crossed the border into the shadow, the dark-vision cameras switched on abruptly, and a warning light flashed on the control panel indicating that there were dangerous temperatures on the other side of the metal walls. It was a sudden change, as though they’d crossed into another world.

The cameras on the outside of Din’s pod painted everything in bright whites, contrasted with soft grays. The gyroscopic wheel did a pretty good job of deadening the impacts as Din drove the pod over the jagged, undulating landscape, but he still felt them jarring through the metal walls and the metal of his armor into his bones. There was no vegetation on the shadow side of the planet, and nothing moved other than a few pebbles small enough to be blown by the icy wind.

With a few button presses against the control panel, Din drew up the New Republic survey map he’d downloaded to the pod’s computer, along with the outlines, in glowing red, that he’d added to it based on information that he’d gotten from the government buildings in the capital. He sent the information to Cara’s pod, as well.

“Is that the route?” Cara said over the transmitter.

“Yeah. I figured we’d take each possible trail in sequence, try to cover as much ground as we can before we need to go back and charge the pods.” He had developed the routes based on records of mineral deposits that had been provided as information for potential investors; Din imagined that the shadow divers would explore around places where mineral deposits had already been found. It was as good a place to start as any, in trying to find the trail of Zekker and the other divers and to find what they had discovered.

“It’s going to be a long day in these things,” Cara answered, and Din made a wordless noise of agreement.

The hours passed, the barren landscape sliding by under the wheels of the pods, and the indicators on their control panels showed the batteries running down steadily. Din didn’t want to take the risk of keeping them out past 50% of battery life, and was about to suggest that they turn around and call it a day, disappointing as it was, when he saw a glimpse of something on one of the cameras.

“Do you see that?” he asked, highlighting the gleam of pale yellow on his infrared camera view with one finger and sending the image to Cara’s pod.

“Got it,” Cara said. “Not much out here to be putting out heat.”

“No there’s not,” Din said, turning his pod on a wide arc. On the camera, he saw Cara do the same. “It’s not red enough to be an animal or a person, but it could be shielding that’s started to break down.”

“Could be,” Cara answered, and her voice had gone grim and tight.

Din leaned forward as much as the cramped space in the pod would allow, his mind focusing on the smear of yellow on the screen. There was the quiet of the hunt in his mind, the quiet he had been looking for. At least, even after everything, he still had that much.

As they got closer, and the smear of yellow got bigger on the screen, Din could see that there was a strip of deeper orange at the bottom of it. Din grew more certain that this was at the very least something that shouldn’t be there: the heat that was leaking out dissipated almost as soon as it hit the air, but there was something warm beneath the ground, something warmer than it had any right to be.

They slowed the pods a little ways away from the spot of warmth. Din set the heat coils in his armor to their highest setting, took a breath to brace himself, and opened the door.

Even with his efforts to prepare himself, the cold was enough to knock the wind out of him. He breathed slowly and deeply through his nose, but even with the warmth produced by his helmet, he had to fight the urge to cough. It took an effort to move, to shift his limbs, and when he looked down, he saw little rills of frost starting to form on the outer surface of the beskar. The parts of him not covered by armor felt chilled to the bone.

Cara, in a full-body cold suit and infrared helmet, stepped from her own pod and gave an hiss of discomfort. She carefully pulled her rifle from the pod, holding it close to her body to keep it as warm as she could. Din drew his own blaster and held it against the side of his body, then jerked his head toward the place where the warmth had been on the camera feed.

In the infrared of his helmet, the yellow and orange glow was even more obvious than in the pod. He and Cara kept themselves low as they hurried across the ground toward it, but nothing seemed to be moving around them. At first, there was no sound other than the wind, but as they got closer to the glow, Din could hear a faint  _ fwoosh _ sound as the hotter air met the colder and its temperature dropped.

Din signaled to Cara to wait, and she knelt to the ground with her gun up as Din crept forward, his blaster held tightly in his hand. When he got to the place where the glow came from, he ran his hand across the ground, feeling the warmth sink through his gloves almost painfully. At first, there didn’t seem to be anything different about the ground, but then his fingers caught on the edge of something metal. He brushed the dirt and stones away and found a heat-shielded vent, one corner bent up slightly, probably having been struck by a stone knocked loose by the wind or by a shadow diver. 

He turned back toward Cara and nodded toward the vent. She set her rifle carefully on the ground and dropped to her knees next to him. They both held still for a long moment, listening, and when they didn’t hear any noise other than the hissing of rapidly cooling air, they slipped their hands under the upturned corner of the vent covering and heaved.

The covering held for a few seconds, then gave with a squeal of metal that was louder than Din would have liked. They set it carefully on the ground, and Din slid his body into the vent, Cara standing over him with her rifle in hand again. After the freezing air of the shadow side of the planet, the warmth made Din’s skin burn. The vent was narrow enough that he could brace himself, his back against one wall and his hands and feet against the other, and begin sliding carefully down. After a moment, he heard the clanks of Cara following him.

The room at the bottom of the vent shaft was narrow but long, and lined on either side by temperature-controlled storage lockers. Din scanned the room, but there didn’t seem to be anyone in it, no movement, no sound other than the air going up the vent.

He moved to the closest locker and flipped it open. Inside was a stack of sealed crates, all the same size and shape, each labeled with a long ID number. There was nothing to indicate what was inside them. Cara opened another; it revealed the same lack of information.

“We could open one of the crates,” Cara murmured.

“Better to keep moving,” Din answered. “We don’t know who might be coming.” Cara nodded and they went for the door. By silent agreement, they fell into a formation next to each other, Din with his blaster out and Cara with her rifle on her shoulder, each covering forty-five degrees and keeping an eye behind them, as well.

There wasn’t much to the structure; it certainly wasn’t a sprawling complex, and there didn’t seem to be very many people staffing it, either. Apart from the storage room, they saw a few dormitories and a canteen, empty of both people and with the bare minimum of equipment. The tension and uncertainty was enough that, when Din heard people approaching around a corner, he was almost relieved.

Din and Cara flattened themselves against the wall, waiting as the footsteps got closer. He could hear the creaking of Stormtrooper armor, and he guessed that there were three sets of footsteps. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, reaching for the calm of the fight. After they took out the Stormtroopers, it wasn’t likely that they’d be able to keep their presence secret much longer.

When the footsteps were nearly to the corner, Din and Cara looked at each other, nodded, and wheeled around into the other hall, guns up. Two shots from Din’s blaster and one from Cara’s rifle, and it was over.

“Someone probably heard that,” Din said, already heading down the hall.

“All the more reason to move fast,” Cara answered.

They continued down the hall, Din standing just in front of Cara so that he could shield her with his beskar if necessary, Cara turned to keep the muzzle of her rifle pointed back the way they’d come. For a moment, Din thought that they hadn’t drawn any attention.

Then there came a shout from up ahead, and a group of eight Stormtroopers came running out of a doorway. At the same time, red alarm lights began to flash all down the hallway, and things became chaotic for a while.

Cara dropped to one knee, bracing her rifle against her shoulder and taking shots as quickly as the gun would allow. Din slid under her line of fire and kicked the legs out from under the Stormtrooper in the front of the pack, then rolled to his feet, grabbed the outstretched gun arm of another trooper, and flipped him to the ground. He got off two shots from his blaster before another trooper crashed into his back, trying to grapple Din’s arms to his sides. He heard Cara shout, and he spun so that his back was to her. A split second later, he heard her rifle fire, and the trooper holding him slumped to the ground. 

When he wheeled around to fight the next trooper, he found that all of them were on the ground. Cara stood and waved a hand at the nearest flashing alarm light. “Guess they definitely know we’re here now.”

Din nodded. “We’ve got to move.” They broke into a run, guns up.

Around another corner, Din skidded through a doorway and was greeted by blaster fire. He stepped to the side to cover Cara and stepped back as the bolts impacted against the beskar at his chest. The muzzle of Cara’s rifle came to rest on his shoulder, and two quick shots took out the two Stormtroopers who had apparently been waiting for them. Din stepped cautiously back into the room, but there didn’t seem to be any other Imps.

The room had apparently been a control room, a bank of computer terminals against one wall, but it took only a quick look to show Din that the terminals had had their memory banks hastily ripped out and taken away. 

“They’re evacuating,” he said, pointing to the terminals. “Taking everything that could give away what they were doing here.”

“They did that quickly,” Cara said. “They were well-drilled.” Din was about to answer when a grinding sound came from somewhere to the north of them. They both froze, listening. “What is that?” Cara asked, her hands tightening on her rifle.

“Hangar door,” Din said urgently, and took off as fast as he could toward the sound, Cara hot on his heels.

They encountered no other Stormtroopers as they made their way in the direction of the sound. The small size of the compound worked in their favor; if it had been much better, they would never have been able to reach the hangar in time. As it was, they very nearly didn’t make it. Din wasted no time; as soon as he caught sight of the door to the hangar, he threw himself forward, somersaulting into the room and coming up to his knees with his blaster in his hand and firing.

The hangar was small, only four berths under a door that was slowly sliding open in the ceiling, letting in cold air that whipped around the room. One of the berths was empty, two held small cargo haulers, and the final one, at the far end of the room, held a sleek TIE Interceptor. Standing in front of the TIE were two Stormtroopers and a third person, dressed in bulky head-to-foot black armor with absolutely no distinguishing marks.

The troopers went down quickly under the hail of Din’s and Cara’s fire, but the person in black ducked almost faster than Din’s eyes could follow, whirling behind one of the landers of the TIE and returning fire with a blaster in each hand. The person’s trigger discipline, Din noticed as he was throwing himself behind one of the cargo haulers, was excellent. They alternated the fire from their blasters with mathematical precision, ensuring that there was never a gap in the rain of bolts.

Cara clanged against the hauler beside Din, breathing heavily. “Got any ideas?”

“One or two,” Din said, and unhooked a grenade from his belt. He took a deep breath, focused, then threw it as hard as he could up and back, arcing it over the top of the hauler. “Get down!” he said, throwing himself to the concrete floor of the hangar. Cara flung herself down next to him, her arms over her head.

The beskar of Din’s helmet was designed to protect him, to a certain extent, from the concussion of explosions, and his grenades were on the small side. Even so, the explosion registered to him as a sudden weight crushing him into the ground, and it was only his training that had him rolling to his feet again immediately afterward, his brain hurrying to catch up.

He poked his head out from behind the hauler to see that the grenade had destroyed two of the TIE’s landers, dropping the ship onto the ground with enough force to have cracked its hull. A person would have to be more reckless even than Din to want to take the TIE into space in that state.

The person in black, apparently, agreed. They had somehow gotten clear of the TIE before the grenade had gone off, and were backing toward the far end of the room. With the TIE knocked out of the way, Din was able to see that there was a dark space at that end of the hangar, seemingly the entrance to a tunnel. That was all he could see before he had to get back into cover as the fire from the blasters resumed.

“They’re still alive? After all that?” Cara groaned, pushing herself up against the hull of the hauler. 

“Apparently,” Din answered, reaching for another grenade. Before he could throw it, the blaster fire stopped. He risked another glance to see the black-clad Imp ducking into the tunnel and disappearing into the dark. “Come on!”

Cara needed no more encouragement; she barrelled out from behind the hauler and toward the entrance of the tunnel. Din found himself having to work to keep up. Fighting the Empire again seemed to have energized Cara.

As they came level with the wrecked TIE, a glint of light caught Din’s eye. He turned his head and saw a little blinking light, a small machine stuck to the wall of the hangar, and the light flashing faster and faster…

There was no time to say anything; instead, he simply flexed his muscles to activate his jetpack and crashed into Cara’s back, wrapping his arms around her and rocketing with her straight up out of the open hangar into the frigid air.

“What are you…?” Cara managed, before the world went white and became very loud.

Din lost his conception of up and down, but was vaguely aware that he was spinning, knocked off-course by the force of the explosion. He hit the ground hard, bounced, and landed again with almost all of the wind knocked out of him. The little air left in his lungs was forcibly expelled by Cara landing on his back a second later.

They both lay still for what seemed like a very long time, but was probably only a few seconds. Finally, with a groan, Cara rolled off of him, and Din was able to push himself onto his back and look up at the dark sky. “Ow,” he finally said, when he was able to draw a breath again.

“Yeah, ow,” Cara said back. “At least you’ve got that armor.” 

“Doesn’t feel like it did me much good,” Din said ruefully, pushing himself to his feet. He felt like he’d been chewed up by a Rancor.

“Any sign of the Imp?” Cara asked, taking the hand he offered her and getting to her feet with a pained sound.

Din made his way over to the hangar door, which had become more of a ragged hole in the ground. There was no movement below, and the entrance to the tunnel had been completely closed off. “Nothing. They’re gone.”

“Well, shit,” Cara said matter-of-factly, and kicked a rock off the edge of the hole and into the side of the TIE with a  _ clank _ . 

Din looked at the TIE himself. It had been turned into a ball of twisted metal, smoking in places, but… He squinted as he looked closer. There was a pocket of the cockpit that had folded over on itself rather than smashing against the ground, and it looked to have burned a bit less.

“Think there’s anything to be recovered?” he asked, pointing toward that section of the ship.

“Only one way to find out,” Cara answered. 

Din activated his jetpack again and carefully maneuvered his way through the rubble to balance on top of the remains of the TIE, avoiding the hottest metal. Bracing his beskar-clad shoulder against a chunk of the hull, he shoved it away and let it drop to the ground. He switched the view in his visor to a magnetic-field view, trying to see if any of the electronics were still active in the cockpit. “There’s something,” he said, and clipped his grappling cord tether to the outside of the ship, ducking under the sizzling hull and into the still relatively intact space.

The piloting computer’s interface had been partly crushed, but under the control panel he could see a spark of electricity still present in the memory bank. He wrenched the twisted panel away and carefully disconnected the memory from the rest of the computer. It looked like it had sustained some damage to the outside of the drive, but there might still be something to be gained from the mess.

He pulled himself back out of the TIE and held up the memory bank for Cara to see. “Let’s get back and see what we can get out of this.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Cara said, shivering.

***

The memory bank, they discovered when they got back to Din’s ship and plugged it in, was more damaged than they’d hoped. They could only get a partial record of where the TIE had been and how often. It had been on Nastrond frequently, as well as on neighboring Jakku, and it had sent transmissions to places in space that must have been other ships. But they could only get about a quarter of the data that the memory banks must have once contained.

“There’s just nothing we can act on,” Cara said at last, throwing herself back in her chair with an irritated huff. “This TIE hasn’t been anywhere near official Imperial space, so we can’t make any kind of formal complaint without it being immediately denied. The Imps have apparently moved out of this system, and knowing where ships  _ were _ months ago doesn’t help us.”

Din shared her frustration, but he wasn’t willing to give up. He scrolled through the partial information and corrupted files doggedly, unable to think of anything else until he’d either found something or exhausted all the possibilities.

And then there was something. He cocked his head at the screen and sat back in his chair a little bit. “What do you make of this?” he asked. Cara leaned forward and looked.

“Regular visits to a planet called Gollon. You know anything about it?”

Din thought for a moment before he placed the name. “Small world, right on the edge of the Known Regions. Not very developed, but the Empire thought there was probably ore to be got out of it. There’s been some investment, but not much.”

“There’s a landing permissions code, look,” Cara said pointing.

Din nodded, slowly. “Would it come from the New Republic?”

“Let’s check and see,” Cara said, and ducked out of the cockpit to where she’d left her gearbag. She came back with a tablet with the symbol of the New Republic on the back, typing in the permissions code. “Here it is. Farseer Survey, got a franchise license from the New Republic six months ago to survey Golion for ore deposits.”

Din shrugged. “It’s better than nothing.”

Cara grinned and threw herself back into the copilot’s seat. “Then let’s get moving.”


	4. Chapter 4

Gollon was not easy to get to. There wasn’t an established hyperspace lane that ran past it, so Din had to program an out-of-lane jump. They spent the first hour or so talking in circles about what they’d discovered in the compound on Nastrond.

“Do you think the person who blew up the ship was Slate?” Cara asked.

Din considered it. “Seems like a possibility. Now they know I’m after them.”

“And the boxes…” Cara trailed off.

The boxes were a mystery. They’d opened all of the crates on their way out of the compound, expecting to find weapons or explosives or electrical components or something else that was immediately useful to a war effort.

Instead, they found lumpy chunks of unprocessed minerals and ores, and canisters of oils and gases.

“They must have been shuttling everything to somewhere they have processing facilities,” Din began.

“Where? The only processing facilities the Empire has access to anymore are on the other side of the galaxy. It doesn’t make sense to put a base like that there unless they’re shuttling things… I don’t even know. To the Unknown Regions?” Cara frowned. “They were the raw materials for shipbuilding, right?”

“Some of them,” Din answered. “But from that state to a finished ship would take a year at least, for a small ship.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Cara said again, shaking her head. “They’re on the back foot, on the run. They should be trying to steal finished ships, or take strategic factories from us. What could they want with…?” She trailed off.

“They’d have to be playing a long game,” Din said, finishing the uncomfortable thought they’d both been dancing around.

“Yeah, but _what_ long game?” 

Din frowned. That was the question, and he didn’t have any kind of answer to it. There wasn’t really any place in the galaxy that the Empire could get away with a large building effort without being noticed, and no one traveled very far into the Unknown Regions. If they did, they didn’t make it back. “You reported the compound to the New Republic. Maybe they’ll be able to turn something else up.”

“Maybe.” Cara shook her head. “I kind of want a nap.”

“You can take the bunk.”

“Are you sure? What about you?” 

“I’m not tired yet.”

Cara raised an eyebrow at him, but she was apparently tired enough that she wasn’t willing to fight him on it. As soon as she was gone, Din leaned his head back in his seat and closed his eyes. He’d spent plenty of time sleeping in the cockpits of ships; a bunk was a nice thing to have, but it wasn’t necessary.

He drifted off, mind still churning over the possible plans of the Empire. He woke up with a start when the control panel beeped to indicate that the jump was almost done. He took the controls almost automatically and guided the ship out of the jump and back into regular space, getting his first glimpse of their destination.

Gollon was not an attractive world, from the outside. Its atmosphere was thin, and humans and most other species required oxygen masks to do more than sit still for any length of time. The stone it was made of was pale, making it look somewhat like a blind eyeball floating in space. Here and there were magma rifts cutting through it, like ragged capillaries. Din frowned at it from the cockpit of his ship.

“We’re making our approach,” he called back into the ship. He heard Cara’s boots on the floor a few moments later.

“Can I stow some of my gear somewhere out of the way?” she asked, poking her head into the cockpit. Her hair stuck up on one side.

“Sure. There’s lockers along the starboard wall. And there’s a mirror in the ‘fresher.”

“Aw, damn it,” she said, tugging ineffectually at her mussed hair. She ducked out of the cockpit again, and he heard her moving around, opening and closing various doors. The sound triggered the same old, familiar tension in his shoulders, the discomfort of having someone in his space, but it didn’t last long. It was Cara, after all. Just Cara.

Still. “If you open the locker with the guns, don’t move them,” he called to her, and heard her snort with amusement.

“I’ll steer clear of it. Wait, is that…? Do you still have that sword thing? Is that what I’m looking at?”

Din felt a jolt of unpleasant surprise. Bo-Katan Kryze had told him, grudgingly, that the Darksaber belonged to him, for the moment, and that while she did not choose to challenge him so soon after he’d lost the kid, she expected him to keep careful track of it and treat it as the precious relic of Mandalore that it was. He’d had other things on his mind, though, right after everything had happened on Gideon’s ship. He’d thought he’d put a lock on the compartment he’d stowed it in. Maybe, in retrospect, he had just intended to put a lock on it.

Maybe, in retrospect, he could have taken better care of it. Or thought about it even once since stowing it away.

“Um… Yes. That is… what that is.”

“Well, it can live under my gear bag now,” Cara answered, and grateful relief swept Din. She didn’t want to talk to him about the Darksaber and what he was going to do with it, and that was ideal as far as he was concerned.

He had far too many contradictory thoughts about that thing.

He heard the locker closing and boots on the floor of the hold, and Cara came into the cockpit and dropped herself into the copilot’s seat. “A few more minutes to approach,” Din told her. “I’d like to do an orbital pass, try to see if we can find Farseer’s operations from the air before we set down.”

“Sounds good to me. Not much to look at, is it?”

“Ugliest planet I’ve seen.”

Cara didn’t answer; when he glanced over at her, he saw that she was looking up at the little ceramic charm hanging on the control panel. She smiled slightly at it, then put her hands behind her head and stared out at space.

Din smiled behind his helmet and kept the ship on its course toward the little sickly-white ball hanging in the black.

***

An orbit of the planet yielded nothing particularly interesting, so Din set them down in the spaceport in the only city, which was about a quarter the size of the main city on Nevarro. If anything, it reminded Din of Mos Pelgo, and he let himself indulge in a moment’s reminiscence.

The spaceport was nothing more than a few flattened-out patches of rock, poorly maintained enough that bits of gravel kicked up by the ship’s engines bounced off the hull with little _ping_ noises that made Din grind his teeth. Just because he wasn’t sure he didn’t hate the ship didn’t mean he wanted it dented up by a bad landing pad.

So he was already irritated with the port master when he and Cara stepped off the ship. The port master was a human man who looked at Din with barely interested confusion from his booth, taking his time setting down the tablet at which he’d been looking and making his way over to them.

“You with the survey people?” he asked, squinting at them a little suspiciously.

Din raised an eyebrow within the safety of his helmet. “We’re here to deliver to them,” he answered. It was a story that wouldn’t stand up to even a moment’s scrutiny, but Din guessed that scrutiny was not what he was going to get from the port master.

Indeed, he just shrugged. “Won’t find them here. They went out into the north lava fields. Didn’t even leave any of their ships behind in the city.”

“Damn,” Cara said wearily, picking up the thread of Din’s cover story. “So we’ve got to go out there?” She jerked her thumb toward the north. “How long ago did they leave?”

“Three days. Shouldn’t be that hard to find from the air, though. They sent a bunch of grunts with the equipment, before the bosses got off the planet.”

“Anything you can tell us that’ll help us find them?” Din asked.

“Other than the fact that there are a bunch of them all together? You usually don’t find that anywhere on the planet other than the city.” He considered for a moment, then said, a little grudgingly, “They were all dressed alike. Company uniforms. All gray, with a logo on their masks.”

“Thanks,” Din said, and turned his back on the port master’s expectant look without tossing the man any credits. He heard him grumbling behind their backs as they made their way back into the ship. _Fix up your port_ , he found himself thinking sourly.

“Alright,” Cara said, in the copilot’s seat again. “Lava fields?”

Din sighed as he started the engine. “Lava means strange thermals. I really don’t like fancy flying.”

Cara laughed. “I’m not sure any of your flying can be described as ‘fancy’.”

“You didn’t see me land on the ice world with all the spiders.”

“From the way you told me that story, you crashed on the ice world with all the spiders.”

“Well, I’ll try not to crash on this one,” Din answered, and pulled at the controls, lifting the ship off the ground and turning it north.

***

If they’d really been looking for Farseer Survey’s employees so they could deliver to them, the search would have taken a lot less time. However, as what they actually wanted was to creep up on them unawares, it took much longer. Din set a careful back-and-forth pattern across the extent of the lava fields, extending the ship’s radar and infrared sensing as far forward as it would go, waiting for the least response.

“What do you think we’ll find?” Cara asked, after a while of searching in silence. She had her rifle across her lap, her hands braced against it as if she’d need to lift it at any moment. “Why do you think an Imperial agent is visiting a little single-planet survey company?”

“Sourcing what they were moving through Nastrond?”

Cara frowned. “Gollon’s on the edges of New Republic space, but it’s still _our_ space. What, they’re trying to steal from under our noses?”

“Seems that way,” Din answered.

“So why work with such a tiny operation?” Cara asked. “There’s no way they couldn’t find someone with more clout to funnel them resources. Some gangster from the Outer Rim.”

“Could be,” Din said. “Unless they aren’t working with Farseer Survey.”

Cara froze, then clenched her hands around the rifle’s barrel. “Unless they _are_ Farseer Survey?” Din shrugged. Cara cursed under her breath. “Arrogant bastards. They really just made themselves a shell company and applied for a license from the New Republic itself?”

A thought occurred to Din. “You said that the license was granted recently?”

“Ten months ago.” He turned and looked at Cara, who looked back for a long moment, then cursed explosively and jumped up, stalking into the cargo hold with her rifle in her hand. When she returned, she had her tablet with her. “Let’s see how many other candidates we’ve got.”

They were silent for a moment as Cara set the parameters of her search, until, after a few minutes, she made a noise like she’d been struck in the stomach. “How many?” Din asked with a sinking feeling.

“Two hundred forty one,” Cara answered grimly. “That’s the number of licenses given in the last twelve months to new companies with some sort of interest in raw materials. Military raw materials.”

“Some of those might be legitimate.”

“Some of them might,” Cara answered. “Probably a lot of them are, there’s been a boom in new businesses since the end of the Empire. The New Republic’s been handing out licenses like candy, hoping to boost the economy. That’s probably why the Empire’s been able to get away with this, right under our nose.”

It was clever, Din reflected. If their suspicions were correct, the Empire, or some faction of it, was using the New Republic’s weaknesses as well as its strengths to do… something. To accumulate resources that they wouldn’t be able to use militarily for years, if not decades. Why? What was the plan, and why was this useful when the Empire itself was barely clinging on to a handful of systems on the other side of the galaxy?

A blinking on the control panel of the ship drew Din’s mind away from the questions. Life forms ahead, somewhere between ten and twenty. “That’s what we’re looking for,” he said, and slowed the engines, dipping the ship down toward the ground for a landing. Questions would have to wait.

***

Din and Cara had suited up, equipped themselves with all the gear and weapons they thought they’d need, fixed their oxygen masks over their faces, and marched double-time to catch up with the group of employees of Farseer Survey. They’d taken a parallel course until they’d found a bit of high ground they could climb up, until they could look down on their quarry.

The party of Farseer Survey employees had spread out from two shuttles, setting up various sensor equipment. Din counted twelve people in the uniforms that the port master had described, heavy gray canvas shirts, coats, gloves, and pants, black boots, and masks with a logo on them, a pair of binocs over a compass. With them were three people in more individual and higher-quality clothing, who hovered around the large maglev carts that the uniformed people were pulling and frequently went to the indicator panels to check on them.

“Twelve grunts, three scientists,” Cara said when she lowered her binocs. “Did you see how the grunts are armed?”

“Each has a blaster, two of them have heavier guns,” Din answered. “A lot of weaponry for a small survey company.”

“It’s explainable. There’s not exactly a police force on this planet, and they’ve got to defend their own interests from possible thieves.”

“It’s still going to cause problems.”

Cara hoisted her rifle off her back and set its barrel against the rocks, stretching herself out along the ground. “If you want me to cover you from up here, you’ll need to stop them from going much farther.”

“Got it,” Din said. He stood up and activated his jetpack, arcing out over the rock and landing behind the group. The ones at the back whirled around, although only one drew a blaster, and from the front of the party there came a clamor of voices asking what was going on. The grunts didn’t seem to be particularly well trained, and before they could recover from the surprise and organize themselves, he shouted, “I just want to talk to whoever’s in charge.”

“Out of my way, let me through!” shouted a voice from the front of the party, and one of the scientists came barrelling through the group of uniformed people. “Who the hell are you?” he asked, his voice hard. “We’ve got a license to survey this planet and we’re on a schedule, we don’t want any interruptions!”

The man had puffed himself up, every inch the offended bureaucrat, but Din narrowed his eyes as he saw the way the man was sweating, despite the chill of the air, the way his eyes were darting side to side, and the way the other two scientists had not come forward. He thought he could see them, hovering at the front of the party, edging their way backward while no one else was looking at them.

He also noticed the slight bulge of the man’s right sleeve, where a very small gun might be concealed.

Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and chaos was a tool that Mandalorians knew how to use. “I’ve been hired by the New Republic to…” he began, but did not finish.

Hardly had the words “New Republic” left his mouth before the man made a sharp motion with his right arm, and light glinted off the gun as it fell into his hand. He raised it and shot at Din, who twisted to catch the bolt against the breastplate of his armor and then ducked to his knees, drawing his blaster. He didn’t need it; a shot came from the top of the ridge where he’d left Cara, and the man dropped with a red stain on his chest.

The group erupted into chaos, several of the uniformed people drawing their guns, others of them dropping to the ground with their hands over their heads, others of them turning and running toward the shuttles. As Din watched, one of the shuttles’ engines began to rumble, and the people in uniforms began shouting in anger and dismay. Through the front windscreen of the shuttle, Din thought he saw the other two scientists.

Din took a chance and raised the volume of the voice modulator in his helmet, shouting as loudly and as carryingly as he could, “I’ve been sent by the New Republic to gather information! I’m not here for you! Put your weapons down! You’re covered by snipers!”

In the wake of his shout, there was a long silence, broken only by the whining of the shuttle’s engine. This was stopped by another shot from Cara’s perch, which entered the engine and caused a series of small, popping explosions. The shuttle had only managed to get a couple of inches off the ground, and crashed down into it again like it had been suspended from cords that had been cut.

Din activated his jetpack again and leapfrogged over the top of the bewildered group of uniformed people and to the door of the shuttle. It had been locked; he shot out the locking mechanism and forced his way into the body of the craft. Inside, the two scientists were sprawled in the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, their heads lolling and their arms hanging, with little bits of blue electricity still playing across their mouths before dissipating. Din checked their pulses anyway, knowing what he’d find. Both were dead. Like the Imperial officer on the ship he’d raided with Bo-Katan Kryze, they’d both killed themselves rather than be captured.

Well, at least he had no more doubts about whether they were Imperial.

When Din stomped his way back out of the ship, he found that the uniformed people were milling around. One of them had apparently found some element of leadership and was ordering the others into a semblance of order. Din was glad to see that all of their guns had been replaced in their holsters.

As he got closer, he was able to make out the new leader saying, “No, don’t argue with me, just put your fucking guns away and sit in a line. Trust me, you don’t want to fuck with any part of this.”

Din knew that voice.

He grabbed the man by the shoulder and spun him around with a little more force than he’d intended. The man stumbled, and only Din’s grip on his shoulder kept him from falling. “What are you doing here?” Din ground out.

“Ow! Damn it, what the hell are _you_ doing here? No, better question, am I going back to prison?” Mayfeld yanked off his oxygen mask so he could glare at Din.

“That depends,” Din said, a little numbly. He was completely nonplussed at this meeting. The last place he’d seen Mayfeld was on Morak, which was a few million lightyears away. How had this happened?

_Is he working for the Empire?_ he couldn’t help but wonder. But that didn’t make any sense. Not after what had happened with Valin Hess. Not after what Din had seen.

Mayfeld sighed and ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Perfect. Just my fucking luck.”

Din considered the situation. He looked over at the shuttles. They were slow, and weren’t suitable to travel in space. “Can you get everyone onto the shuttle that’s left and back to the capitol?” he asked, gesturing at the other uniformed people.

Mayfeld turned and glanced over his companions, who had, although not without grumbling, seated themselves in a line, weapons stowed. “Yeah, I’ll get them back. Don’t want to hold their hands much longer than that, though. Bunch of assholes.”

“We’ll be waiting for you at the shipyard,” Din said. “We’ll have some questions to ask you. All of you. I wasn’t lying about working for the New Republic on this one.”

Mayfeld sighed explosively. “Yeah. Fuck. Fine. But seriously, am I going to prison? I swear I thought this job was on the up-and-up, and I have no idea why that guy flipped out and tried to shoot you.”

Din considered. “I don’t think you’ll be going to prison. But just so you know, the other two scientists killed themselves when their shuttle was brought down.”

Mayfeld reeled back, startled. “What the fuck? Why? What… What is this? What is actually going on here?”

Din switched the view from his visor to infrared, so that he could watch the beating of Mayfeld’s heart. It was starting to edge up into panic, but Din didn’t think he’d been lying. It was possible, of course, but… 

Din really didn’t think Mayfeld had known who he was working for. Din felt a stab of pity for the man.

“I’ll explain later,” Din said. “Just get them to the capitol. Let them know that they’re not suspected of anything, but we need to ask them some questions.” He flexed his shoulders to fire up his jetpack and soared back to where he’d left Cara.

“Was that fucking Mayfeld down there?” she asked, lifting herself up off the ground as he landed. 

“Yes.”

She cursed. “I didn’t think he’d go running right back to the Empire as soon as I took my eyes off him. Damn it.”

Din tilted his head to the side. “I’m… not sure that he did. But all the survivors will be waiting for us to question when we get back to the capitol.”

***

Din’s ship was fast enough that they made it back to the capitol before the shuttles, but not by much. They’d gotten settled and informed the port master that the shuttles were incoming when they heard the whine of the shuttle approaching.

When it had landed, the door opened and one of the Farseer employees hopped out, pointing back into the shuttle and shouting something incomprehensible at the distance before storming over to the open gangway of Din’s ship and stomping up into the cargo hold as if he owned the place. Din was not surprised when he pulled down his oxygen mask and glared at him with Mayfeld’s eyes. “Okay,” he said sternly, his voice shaking only slightly, “time for you to tell me what the _fuck_ is going on.”

Din and Cara looked at each other. Cara leaned back against the wall of the ship and said, “I have to talk to all the rest of them. You can handle this guy.” Mayfeld glared at her.

“How long have you been working for Farseer Survey?” Din cut in, to keep the situation from devolving.

“Few weeks. They were picking up people to guard their scientists and equipment, I figured it was simple enough. Fuck, I looked them up and they had a New Republic license, I swear this job is legal! _Was_ legal. I haven’t taken an illegal job since the last time I saw you.”

“Really?” Cara asked.

“Really! Well, you know, not _majorly_ illegal. I ended up on Nal Hutta, the gangs from Tattooine tend to recruit offworlders from there and I thought I could get some work where they wouldn’t look too closely at my identity. But I kept hearing stories about some coup that had unseated one of the bosses on Tattooine, shaken everything up, so I figured I’d find something else. Farseer was recruiting, and I thought I could get a couple of paychecks from them before they went belly-up and then move on to something better. Seriously,” his voice got louder in his distress, “they’re just a rinky-dink survey company! What the hell is going on?”

Din spent a brief moment considering how best to break the news, but decided that, as usual, brutal honesty was the best policy. “They’re the Empire, Mayfeld. A front for the Empire. Those scientists were Imps.”

The silence was deeply uncomfortable, but the way Mayfeld broke it with a nervous laugh was more so. “No. That’s crazy, what the hell, Mando? No way. That’s nuts. No way that’s true.”

Din told him what they’d found on Nastrond and what had led them to Gollon. The longer he talked, the more color bled out of Mayfeld’s face, until, when he’d finished, the other man practically fell to the floor of the cargo hold, sitting with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up.

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” he muttered, and ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. “They got me again. Those bastards got me _again_ . Fuck. _Fuck!_ ” He pulled his hands away from his eyes and stood up, not looking at them. He started back toward the gangway of the ship.

“Where are you going?” Cara called to him.

“I’m going to tell the rest of the poor stupid bastards out there that they’ve been played,” Mayfeld said, in a terribly even voice, “and then I’m going to find the nearest place to drown myself in Corellian whiskey.”

Cara looked like she’d say something else, but Din caught her eye and shook his head. Whatever storm was kicking off in Mayfeld’s head, he didn’t think they wanted to step into the middle of it. They watched him go, his shoulders hunched up and his head down.

“Well, I guess we should get to it, if we’ve got to grill eleven more people,” Cara said. She glanced at him and grinned. “Lucky we’ve got that Mando armor for the intimidation factor, right?”

“It’s what I’m best at,” Din deadpanned in response, and Cara laughed.

***

It didn’t take long for them to finish talking to the Farseer employees. They all told similar stories to Mayfeld: looking for a quick paycheck or two, recruited from places like Nal Hutta or Tattooine where it was well-known that you could pick up work of varying legality. None had thought anything of working for Farseer Survey; they’d all thought that it was just a small operation, heading toward bankruptcy but legal. None had had any particular relationship with the scientists, who had kept to themselves and not exchanged more than a few words with the grunts.

None of them had heard of anyone called Slate, and none of them had heard the scientists say anything about Nastrond.

When they were done, they retreated back to Din’s ship and shut the gangway, leaning against the wall of the hold. Cara sighed. “I’m not sure what we can do next.”

“The scientists had tablets,” Din said, although without very much hope. It was unlikely they'd left anything incriminating on them. “And we can follow up on the worlds where they’ve been recruiting.”

It was a slender thread. Worlds like Nal Hutta were so good for recruiting because they were so lawless, because so much could be done under the table and under the radar.

Din was racking his brain to think of any other potential lead they had when he heard something hit the hull, on the underside of the gangway. He sprang to his feet just as someone outside shouted, “Hey! Mando! Open up!”

Din slammed his hand against the control of the gangway and crossed his arms as it lowered. “Did you just throw a rock at my ship?” he asked angrily.

“Yup,” Mayfeld answered, unrepentantly. He had a heavy black bag slung over one shoulder and his arms crossed over his chest. 

“What are you doing?” Din asked.

“I’m thinking about which of my guns I want to use first, when we catch up to the assholes who hired me.”

“We?” Din tilted his head to the side and waited, letting his motionlessness be as unsettling as it usually was.

Mayfeld wasn’t unsettled. He just yelled up, defiantly, “Come on, Mando, help me out here!”

Din considered for a moment. With the New Republic on its way to investigate, getting off Gollon was a necessity for Mayfeld, and Din’s ship was his best option. He could be intending to hop off and vanish as soon as they got to another planet. Honestly, Din wouldn’t mind that terribly, although it would be annoying to have someone else on his ship, in his space.

But he didn’t think that was likely to happen. Even with night falling, he could see the way Mayfeld’s eyes were narrowed over the top of his mask, the set of his shoulders, the way his fists were clenched at his sides. He didn’t think he was likely to leave before the people who had hired him had been tracked down.

Even the Empire could push someone far enough that they’d bite back, as Valin Hess had learned.

“Come on,” Din said, and stepped aside from the top of the gangway.

“Good choice,” Mayfeld said as he stomped his way on board, “because I brought something for you.” Reaching into a pocket, he pulled out a small hand-held tablet that looked like it had been made from two tablet halves that had been soldered together. He continued, pressing a few buttons, “I may have been desperate, but I’m not stupid. I took a cut on my first paycheck so I could get it in advance.” He flipped the tablet around and handed it to Din.

Din scanned his eyes over the screen, taking in all the transaction details, including… “The bank routing number,” Din said. Cara, who had come into the cargo hold to see what was going on, sucked in a breath of air and looked over his shoulder at the number.

“Yup,” Mayfeld said, and leaned himself against the wall of the cargo hold.

“You think that’ll lead somewhere?” Cara asked, but she was already pulling her own tablet from her pocket.

“Check and see,” Din answered, and waited anxiously as she did a search of the number.

She frowned and wrinkled her nose. “It belongs to the Stellar Bank of the Rim. The New Republic doesn’t have any flags on it, it seems to be legitimate.”

Din cocked his head, considering that for a long moment. “One way to find out for sure,” he said, and gestured Cara to follow him to the cockpit. Mayfeld shrugged himself off the wall and followed them.

Din took the pilot’s seat and set his communications array to put a call in to Nevarro. It took a long moment to get through, given the distance between them, but finally, the call was picked up, and Greef Karga’s face looked back at him from the control panel. “Mando?” he began, his voice crackling over the spotty connection. “What do you want? Are you going to send back our Marshal any time soon?”

“Probably not,” Din said. “Can you tell us if the Guild has any records of the Stellar Bank of the Rim?”

Karga narrowed his eyes in consideration. He didn’t reach for any kind of computer or tablet; Din knew that he had most of the Guild’s records memorized, like he carried around a database in his brain. It was a point of pride, with him. “The Stellar Bank of the Rim… Yeah, the Guild knows about them. They’re a front for a consortium that helps launder credits for criminal organizations. A good front, though, I don’t think the New Republic knows about them yet.”

Cara made an irritated noise from the copilot’s seat. “You could have told the New Republic that.”

Karga grinned. “Is that Marshal Dune there? Tell her that the Guild keeps its own records. If the New Republic wanted to hire us to find out which businesses are legitimate and which aren’t…” He trailed off.

Cara sighed. “I’ll suggest it.” Mayfeld laughed, and Cara turned to glare at him over her shoulder.

“Karga,” Din said firmly, trying to get the conversation back on track, “do you know where the Stellar Bank’s consortium is headquartered?”

Karga thought again for a moment, then said, “Tattooine. City called Mos Chanda.”

Din nodded. “Thanks, Karga.”

“Don’t mention it. Don’t get killed.” With that, Karga cut the connection. Din leaned back in the pilot’s chair and swiveled it around to look at Cara and Mayfeld. “Tattooine, then.”

“Great,” Mayfeld said, rubbing at his forehead with the thumb and forefinger of one hand. “I’m sure it’ll be fun to try to hunt down this bank in the middle of whatever coup shit they’ve got going on there. There’s a reason I thought better of heading there.”

“Could be good for us,” Din said, already grinning to himself under the cover of his helmet.

“How do you figure?” Mayfeld asked, with palpable sarcasm.

“I happen to know the new player. Have a standing invitation to visit.”

Silence greeted this announcement, and Din took great pleasure in the astounded looks from both Cara and Mayfeld. Cara recovered first, half-yelling, “Fett? Are you serious? _That’s_ where he is?”

“Mm-hmm,” Din answered, unable to keep his amusement out of his voice. “It’ll be the warmest welcome we’ve gotten so far. Buckle up.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The ongoing saga of people awkwardly trying to care about Din's feelings and Din awkwardly not knowing what to do about it.

Din didn’t like to think about the life he’d had before he was taken in as a foundling. He didn’t even remember much of it, really, everything covered over in a haze that made him feel on edge when he examined it too closely. It wasn’t as though it mattered, anyway; he had been taken as a foundling, and that was that.

Nevertheless, occasionally a memory from that other life would surface when he wasn’t expecting it. As he stood in the canteen of his new ship, pouring caf packets into the brewing machine set into the wall, he abruptly thought of his long-ago mother saying that a good host makes everyone comfortable in their home. She’d said that often. He thought he remembered her standing in the kitchen of their home, sun from the open window glancing off her dark hair.

He clenched his jaw and banished the memory. He flatly refused to think about it as he poured caf into three dented tin mugs and took them to the table, where Cara and Mayfeld were sitting.

He was not a host, just a man with a ship. A ship was not a home ( _ don’t think about the Razor Crest _ , he insisted to himself), and he didn’t even like having people on his ship with him. The whole situation was absurd.

He set the mugs on the table and decided that if they had to be there, he could at least get them to think about the situation they were flying into. “Alright,” he said, “I didn’t let Fett know we were coming, our communications might be monitored. It won’t be a problem. Like I said, standing invitation.”

“And you think he can scare up some information on the Bank?” Cara asked, taking a sip of her caf.

“I think he’s got a good chance of it,” Din answered. “He’s good at finding things out.” He’d found Din, after all. Din still wasn’t entirely sure how he’d done that.

“He snapped up Jabba’s old gang, right?” Mayfeld asked, sipping from his own mug. He made a face. “Is this the absolute cheapest caf in the galaxy, or just on the planet you picked it up?”

“It isn’t the absolute cheapest,” Din answered, a little defensively. He’d never understood the idea that caf tasted different depending on the type you bought. It all tasted the same to him.

“I hate to agree with this guy, but it is pretty dreadful,” Cara said. Mayfeld snorted a laugh.

“As I was saying,” Din continued pointedly. “We should be prepared to break in and take what we need. Mayfeld, you said you’d brought some weaponry with you?”

Mayfeld nodded and held up a hand to count off on his fingers. “Yeah, I’ve got two T-12 blasters in pretty decent condition, a T-24 that fires but needs a bit of work to be really reliable, a 301-B sniper rifle, a 301-C sniper rifle, a Silvereye P1 pocket pistol,” he held up his other hand and continued the count, “a Y4F6 slug-launcher, and some of the parts for a 400-series Longshot. I’ve been keeping an eye out for the rest.”

“I thought you were out of credits,” Cara said.

“There’s always credits for guns,” Mayfeld answered, with a shrug and a sip of his caf. “Besides, I got most of them cheap because they were fixer-uppers. Something to do to with my hands keep myself from going insane.”

“Fair enough,” Din said. 

“So we’ve got all that,” Cara said, “I’ve got a rifle, and Mando’s got a blaster.”

“And a beskar spear,” Din put in.

“Plus your extra-special ‘I’m a king now’ sword,” Cara said, smirking at him over the rim of her mug.

“Wait, his  _ what _ ?” Mayfeld said, actually putting his mug down on the table in his surprise.

“Don’t ask,” Din said firmly. “It’ll stay in its locker.” He turned his back on the both of them decisively and tilted his helmet up so he could take a sip of his caf.

Mayfeld and Cara didn’t know what they were talking about. It tasted the same as any other caf he’d ever had.

“Okay,” Cara said. “So we’ve got enough guns to furnish a small army, and Fett will probably bring a bunch of his own, not to mention that Fennec will probably be there, too.”

“If I remember her right,” Mayfeld said, “she’ll be armed to the teeth and have a heart full of murder.”

“Yeah,” Cara answered fondly, looking dreamily into the middle distance.

“So we’ll have a shot,” Din said.

“Just about,” Cara answered.

A long silence followed as they sipped their caf. Suddenly, Mayfeld set his cup down with a  _ thump _ and said, “Okay, don’t throw me out an airlock if I wasn’t supposed to ask, but you’ve gotta tell me what happened with the kid.”

Din opened his mouth to answer him and found, to his utter dismay, that he couldn’t. His voice seemed frozen in his throat and his heart slammed against his ribs. He was going to have to listen to the silence stretch out and out, and he couldn’t bear it…

“Kid’s fine,” Cara answered. “Training to be a Jedi.”

“No shit, really?” Mayfeld glanced between Cara and Din, brow furrowed, clearly wondering what else there was to the story, but then he just picked his mug up again and didn’t say anything more about it.

Din let out a slow breath of relief.

The relief was short-lived, as the next question out of Mayfeld’s mouth was, “Wait, what’s the deal with the sword?”

***

When they came out of hyperspace, Tattooine was reassuringly the same as always, a sandy ball hanging in the black. It was strange how much of a relief it was to return to a place where he’d spent so much time, and he found himself wondering idly why he hadn’t taken Fett up on his offer.

Well, he knew why. It had been… nice, he supposed, to spend time with another Mandalorian who wasn’t part of his covert and wasn’t Bo-Katan or one of her flunkies, but he wasn’t cut out for the life of a crime boss. He wasn’t cut out to be looked to or to take charge of anything. He wasn’t cut out to rule.

He resolutely did not think about the Darksaber tucked away in one of the lockers.

Fett had given him a code to land near his compound, out in the desert away from the cities, without being fired on. He started the code broadcast as he steered his ship toward the coordinates he’d been given.

“Wait, so does he live out in the middle of nowhere?” Mayfeld asked, looking over Din’s shoulder as they left the airspace of Mos Eisley behind.

“Easier to defend, out here,” Cara answered him. “You can see everything that’s coming, and it would be hard to get close to him.”

  
“Yeah, but what’s the point of being a crime boss without some luxuries?” Mayfeld grumbled.

“I wouldn’t worry about the luxuries,” Din answered, pointing ahead toward the compound as it came into view. Or, rather, the palace.

Mayfeld whistled. “I take it back,” he said. “Is Fett hiring people who aren’t Mandos? Think you could put in a good word for me?” Cara gave him a look, and he put up his hands. “Kidding! I’m on the straight and narrow, I swear!”

Fett’s palace, formerly Jabba’s palace, loomed closer and closer, an enormous round structure on the edge of a cliff, casting a long shadow across the sand. There was a cleared patch of ground in front of the building, where the sand had been cleared away to reveal bare rock, that Din assumed acted as a landing pad. He hovered the ship over the ground and set it down slowly, pale yellow dust drifting up all around them as the wind displaced it.

As soon as the gangway touched the ground, Din was stepping out into the hot, dry air, and marching out over the sand toward the entrance, Cara and Mayfeld’s steps crunching over the ground behind him.

Two guards stood in front of the entrance, muffled head to foot in robes, hoods, and masks so that Din couldn’t even tell their species. Each carried a rifle in their hands and a blaster at their hip. Din came to a stop a few feet in front of them, crossing his arms and staring them down with studied unconcern.

“I’m here to see Fett,” he said calmly. “He at home?”

The guards looked at each other, tightening their grips on their rifles, clearly confused. This wasn’t the way people usually approached Boba Fett’s new stronghold, apparently. One of the guards finally said, “No one sees Fett. Not unless he summons them.”

Din cocked his head. “I’ve got an invitation. Why don’t you go tell him about me and my armor, and see what he says?”

The guards tensed, looking at each other again. They murmured in rapid-fire Huttese, and Din was barely able to keep up with the conversation, but he knew when he’d won. The guard who’d spoken to him barked an order, cutting off the other guard’s protests, and the other guard hunched his shoulders angrily and slammed a hand against the door control, slinking into the shadows beyond.

The long moment that followed was tense and awkward, so it didn’t surprise Din much when Mayfeld piped up from behind him, apparently compelled to break the silence, “So, what, Fett just has you standing outside in the sun all day? Seems like a raw deal to me.” 

Din smirked as the remaining guard clenched his hands tighter on his gun and said, in accented basic, “Shut the hell up.”

“What? I’m just saying… Ow!” Mayfeld cut himself off as Cara punched him in the arm. She was nervous in this place, Din realized. When she’d run from the world, she’d gone to quiet, mostly still places, and when she’d come back, it had been with the weight of the New Republic behind her. She didn’t feel comfortable on a world like Tattooine, crawling with activity and most of it lawless.

But Din did. This was his kind of world. Tattooine’s wide open spaces had become almost as familiar to him as the Covert’s dark, narrow halls. Just being there felt like a weight had come off Din’s chest.

He stepped back, away from the remaining guard, and looked out over the landscape, toward the horizon. Cara raised an eyebrow at him. “You almost look like you like it here.”

“Tattooine’s not so bad,” Din answered.

“You’re kidding, right?” Mayfeld grumbled. “I can  _ feel _ my head turning to bacon. We’ve got to get inside or I’m going to have grill marks on me, I swear.” Cara laughed, and Mayfeld made a rude hand gesture in her direction. “How are you even alive?” Mayfeld asked, turning to Din and waving his hand to take in the head-to-toe beskar. “You should be cooked like a skrail in a pot.”

Din tapped a finger against his breastplate and said, “It comes with temperature control on the inside of the armor.”

“You’re shitting me,” Mayfeld said, shaking his head. “Really? You bastard.”

“Comes in handy,” Din answered, drily. 

“How do you know Tattooine so well?” Cara asked, shading her own eyes so she could look out in the same direction. “You haven’t been outside the Covert that long.”

“The brother or sister out in the world is expected to bring back useful information, and the brothers and sisters left in the Covert are expected to learn it,” Din answered. “You know how many bounties end up on Tattooine?”

Cara grinned and squinted at him. “I can imagine.”

A flurry of activity at the door indicated the return of the first guard. He slouched in the doorway, looking at Din with an expression that was unreadable under his mask, and growled, “Fett says to show you in.”

“Lead the way,” Din answered, and followed the guard into the darkness inside the palace.

***

The palace was swarming with people. Apparently, Fett hadn’t had any trouble getting followers to flock to his banner. He must have been making waves, to attract this many. He must have been shaking things up  _ very _ noticeably. 

Din was almost proud of his fellow Mandalorian. He was certainly more at ease than Cara and Mayfeld, who had both taken a step closer to him, glaring around at the people of various species lounging against walls and hustling through the corridors on errands, all of whom glared back. Din knew better. If they didn’t start anything, they wouldn’t take anything; he hadn’t known Fett long, but he’d known enough of him to know that there was honor in the man, of his own fashion.

At last, they reached a doorway at the top of a short flight of stone steps leading down into a wider space. The guard stopped them at the top of the stairs and headed down into the room alone. A moment later, he came hurrying back up the stairs, gesturing for them to go down. He did not follow them when they did.

There were no guards or other hangers-on in the throne room. In fact, there were only three people present: Fett, in full armor, reclining on a stone seat that had obviously been made for a much larger body, yet still seeming to fill the space. Fennec, sitting sideways on a chair placed at his right hand, her legs thrown over one of the chair’s arms. And standing awkwardly on the floor in front of the throne platform, hands bound in shackles in front of him, was…

“Hey, Mando!” Cobb Vanth said sheepishly, waving one hand at him awkwardly and dragging the other behind it. “Good to see you!”

“Cobb, what are you doing here?” Din asked. He wasn’t so much confused as resigned.

“Well, I had a bit of a misunderstanding with, um… your friend.” Cobb jerked his head in Fett’s direction, and Fett turned to look at Din.

“He said you knew him,” Fett said. “I’d decided that it wasn’t worth sending you a message, but then here you came. So.” He gestured to Cobb.

“Yeah, I know him,” Din said. “I can vouch for him, if that’s necessary. Why do you have him chained up in your palace?”

“Funny thing,” Fett said sarcastically, and Fennec smirked. “Here I am, trying to make connections, form alliances, take out enemies, and I run into a gang who’re insisting that I ran them out of a nothing little town called Mos Pelgo.”

“I’d hardly say nothing,” Cobb muttered, and Fett and Fennec both swung their heads around to stare at him. He wilted visibly.

“Anyway,” Fett said pointedly, “this gang isn’t a major player, but they’ve got some big friends, so all of a sudden I find myself with trouble I wasn’t anticipating. And all because I was supposedly fighting a mining concern in Mos Pelgo. Which I had no memory of doing. So I sent some people out to gather information, and found this one.” He waved at Cobb.

“I told him a Mandalorian came and took my armor away, but he apparently didn’t believe me. I told him about hunting the Krayt dragon and everything,” Cobb cut in.

(“Krayt dragon?!” Din heard Cara whisper behind him.)

“Oh, I believed you,” Fett answered. “I got my armor back from that very Mandalorian, in fact. I was just annoyed.”

“You… But… You’ve had me in a cell for six days!” Cobb sputtered indignantly.

Fennec laughed out loud at that. Fett shrugged. “Well, if that Mandalorian,” he gestured to Din, “vouches for you, I guess you’re alright.” He stood up and sauntered down the stairs from the throne, coming to a stop in front of Cobb. Cobb tensed, ready to fight, but Fett just reached for the cuffs and keyed in the code to unlock them. “Just be careful whose armor you wear next time.”

“Sure thing,” Cobb said with a nervous smile, as he rubbed at his wrists. “I’ll just… be getting away from here as quickly as possible. Mando, good to see you again.” He nodded to Din, with careful dignity, and Din was certain that if he’d had a hat, he would have tipped it to all of them. Then he made to push past them and head to the door out of the throne room.

“Wait,” Din said, turning to look at him.

Cobb’s eyes darted back and forth nervously. “What, you want to catch up right now? I should leave you to whatever business you have with…” He waved a hand at Fett without looking at him.

“Actually, you might be able to help us,” Din said. He softened his voice as much as he thought he was capable of and said, “If you’re willing. I know you’ve got things to do in Mos Pelgo.”

Cobb, to Din’s surprise, actually smiled genuinely at that. “Well, the last time was pretty fun. What is it I can help you with?”

“Does Mos Pelgo still have good relations with the Tuskens?”

Cobb’s face brightened, and his slight smile turned into a bright grin. “Oh, yeah. We’ve kept that going.” He held up his hands and signed a Tusken greeting, and even tried (and mangled) a vocalized greeting, as well.

“Good to know,” Din said, smiling behind his helmet.

“What’s this all about?” Fett asked, leaning against a wall with his arms crossed. Fennec, Din had noticed, had pushed herself up onto her elbows slightly, her head cocked and one eyebrow raised in expectant interest.

“Have you ever heard of the Stellar Bank of the Rim?” Din asked.

Fett shrugged. “Money launderers. Fund some criminal activity. My illustrious predecessor had a few accounts with them, and they were very accommodating when I wanted to take those accounts over. Why?”

“We’re going to break in,” Din answered.

Fennec actually sat up entirely at that, both eyebrows raised, looking almost impressed. Fett pushed himself off the wall and laughed. “You’re ambitious, I’ll give you that. Although it’s a bit of a step down from an Imperial destroyer.” He laughed again. “We’re in.”

***

Fett was quite a host, Din would give him that. Not even twenty minutes after they’d arrived, Din and his companions found themselves seated on cushions arranged around an enormous table. Around the rim of the table were platters of food and pitchers of drink, and at the center was a holo of the city of Mos Chanda, home of the headquarters of the Stellar Bank of the Rim.

Din ducked his head so he could push his helmet up slightly and pop a piece of grilled meat into his mouth. He almost made a noise aloud. It was absurdly good. For a long moment, it was silent as everyone was far too busy with eating and drinking to say anything. Fett sat on the largest cushion, watching them all for a long moment with what Din thought, from the way he carried himself, was satisfaction, then he took hold of his own helmet and pulled it off, setting it on the table as he prepared himself a plate of his own.

Mayfeld choked on his mouthful of whatever was in the pitchers, then slammed his cup back down on the table. He laughed through his coughs. “That’s why you said they’d recognize your face! You’re a Stormtrooper!”

Fett raised one eyebrow at Mayfeld. That was all his face did, but Din could tell by the set of his shoulders that he was angry. “I am not, actually.”

“But…”

“Cloned from the same stock,” Fett said shortly. “But I was never a Stormtrooper.” He tore a piece off a wide circle of flatbread, and used it to gesture toward the holo. “Shall we get down to it?”

“That’s their building?” Cara asked, pointing to a red dot amid the blue of the holo map.

“That’s not their public building. If you want to strike a deal with the Bank, you go here.” Fett gestured, and a black dot appeared two blocks away from the red one. “But I have it on good authority that the actual business gets done in the other building. Including all storage of data.”

“So if we want to find out whether they’ve been dealing with the Empire, we’ll have to get in there,” Din said.

Fett nodded. “I did a bit of recon myself of that building, a few weeks ago when I was concluding my business with them. Just to be sure I knew who I was getting into bed with. Here’s what I’ve got.” He swiped a hand through the holo, and the map zoomed in on the building, overlaying recorded images that Fett must have taken from the roof of one of the neighboring buildings.

“It looks pretty ordinary,” Cobb said, looking unimpressed.

“What, you want a big sign saying ‘secret crime bank vaults here’?” Mayfeld responded.

Cobb shrugged. “They could at least dress it up a little.”

“It would have been more polite for them to have put a nice Imperial emblem on the roof, so we’d know just what to shoot at,” Cara said.

Din ignored them as his eyes roved over the images. Fett had taken stills from all angles, from above and at street level. The building was near the edge of town, only a few scattered outbuildings separating it from the Dune Sea, and had a delivery entrance facing in the direction of the open sand. The Stellar Bank must want to receive deliveries without many people being around to notice. “That’s our way in,” Din said, pointing to the entrance.

“You intercept a delivery?” Fennec cocked her head. “Hard to do without drawing attention.”

“Not if we intercept it out on the Dune Sea,” Din answered. “Which is where our friends the Tuskens would come in. Mos Pelgo and Mos Chanda are in the same tribe’s territory.”

Fennec grinned. “Fair enough. Could work.”

Fett nodded. “It’s a thought. I’m not sure how much I trust the Tuskens, though.” 

“They’re alright,” Cobb said, a little defensively. How times had changed for him, apparently. 

Fett looked at Din for confirmation, and Din nodded. Fett shrugged. “Alright. If you say so. Now,” and he gestured again, the recorded images vanishing and the map instead being overlaid with infrared imaging. “There’s one other entrance above ground that I could see. When I was there, there was only one guard at that entrance.” He pointed to the person-shaped red blur near the door. “But there were no heat or electronic signatures from deeper in the building, which makes no sense. It looks as though they’ve got some kind of shielding as soon as you pass beyond the public-facing parts of the building. Probably an electromagnetic cage.”

“So we’re pretty limited in terms of what we know about the personnel they’ve got on hand,” Din said.

“We don’t necessarily have to be,” Fennec put in. “I could go in before the main operation, visit the cantinas, gather information about who is moving where and who’s spending money where. It would make it easier to make an estimate, and there’s not as much ground to cover in Mos Chanda than in one of the bigger cities.”

“It’s a good idea,” Fett answered. “But we’re going to have to accept a certain amount of uncertainty.”

“What if we launched an attack on the public building?” Cara put in, pointing to the other dot. “You said yourself that they keep the vault building’s existence quiet. Presumably they’re expecting attacks on the other building.”

“A distraction,” Din picked up the thread. “Cause a lot of chaos, draw some of the guards away from the vault building.”

“I’d be happy to take some shots at their fancy front doors,” Fennec said. “I’m good at causing chaos.”

“That’s all well and good, but I’ve got another question,” Mayfeld put in, leaning his elbows on the table. “How are we going to get what we want out? When we pulled a job like this on Morak, we knew exactly what information we wanted, and all it was was a few coordinates. This is a bigger net. We won’t fit their entire data store on something hand-held, and we won’t have time to sort through it for specific files.”

“Fett,” Din said, glancing at the other Mandalorian, “you wouldn’t happen to be able to get us a mainframe big enough to receive their records, would you?”

Mayfeld snorted. “It would have to be huge. Not even a Wookie could carry something that big.”

“No,” Fett said, a smile spreading across his face, “but a ship could.”

“We get in,” Din said, “we disable the electromagnetic cage, Fett flies in with the mainframe on board, we start the information on their computer systems downloading.”

“They’ve probably got safeguards against exfiltration,” Fennec put in. “It would be password-protected, at the very least.”

“I know the kind of programs banks use for that,” Fett said unconcernedly. “I can write code to disable the safeguards. All the people on the inside would have to do is plug the code into their main computer systems.”

“You know how to do that?” Cara asked.

“No need to sound so surprised. I’ve been a bounty hunter since I was twelve years old, you think this is the first time I’ve robbed a bank?”

Cara shrugged and held up her hands to concede the point.

“A team inside the vault building,” Din said, counting off on his fingers as he spoke, “a team to create the distraction at the main building, and Fett to receive the data.”

“And be the getaway ship,” Fett said. “The roof of the building’s flat enough that I can land a ship on it. You get up there and pile in, I can fly away with you and the information.”

Din smiled as the plan started to take shape in his mind. “That will work,” he said, firmly, as if telling the world that it would be true. He hoped the world listened to him.

***

When all the food and drink had been cleared away, and all the moving parts of the plan hammered out, Din left the palace to check on his ship. He didn’t think anyone would touch it, not if it would mean risking Fett’s wrath, but it gave him something to do, something to calm the restlessness he was feeling. He walked slowly around it, examining it carefully, making sure that it didn’t need anything.

When he’d made a full circuit, he found Fett standing at the nose, looking up at it silently, his helmet back in place.

Din stood next to him, following his gaze up. The second sun was going down, the shadows lengthening, the first stars starting to appear in the sky.

“How is it?” Fett asked, gesturing toward the ship.

Din frowned, thinking about the answer. “It’s a good ship,” he finally said. Karga really had done right by him. He didn’t have anything to complain about.

“But it’s not yours,” Fett said.

Din didn’t answer for a long while. Finally, he said, “No. It’s not.” All of a sudden, the ship was difficult to look at; he turned his head to the side so he could look at the horizon instead.

“Slave One was my father’s ship,” Fett said after a moment. “I got it from him. I’ve probably spent as much time in that ship as I have on the ground.” Fett put his gloved hand on Din’s armored shoulder, and Din turned away from the horizon to look at him again. “It would take me a long time to learn to live with another ship.”

“I…” Din stopped, considered. “I’ll get used to it.”

“Hmm,” Fett answered, noncommittally. He took his hand away from Din’s shoulder, crossed his arms across his chest. “You’re alright, Djarin. Someone I can trust to watch my back in a fight. You ever need something, let me know.”

“Other than help robbing a bank?” Din asked drily. 

Fett laughed. “Yeah. Other than that.”

Din turned toward Fett and held out his hand. Fett clapped his hand around Din’s wrist, and Din grasped his arm in return. “I’ll keep that in mind,” Din said. Fett nodded to him, then turned and headed back toward the palace. Din looked up at his ship for another moment, as night came on all around him, then followed him.


	6. Chapter 6

That night, they slept in the guest quarters of Fett’s palace. Din couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept somewhere so lavish. Probably never. The bed was too soft, but the sound of people moving around the palace, attending to various business, reminded him enough of the constant murmur of activity in the Covert that he slept better than he had in months.

The next morning, they split up.

Fennec and Mayfeld headed for Mos Chanda ahead of the rest of them, to reconnoitre the area and prepare to cause a hell of a distraction at the Bank’s official building. Fett headed to Mos Eisley to see a man about some tech to receive the exfiltration.

Din, Cara, and Cobb borrowed speeder bikes from Fett and headed out across the Dune Sea for Mos Pelgo, and beyond that, for the Tuskens.

“Watch out, Mando,” Cobb had said with a wink in Din’s direction. “You’re not the only one with Tusken friends now. They might even like me better!”

Din shook his head. “We’ll see about that.”

When they’d arrived in Mos Pelgo, half the population came out to the main street to greet them. Cobb had moved through the people, greeting everyone and reassuring them that he was fine and somehow finding everyone in the town that they needed to talk to to get gear and provisions for the journey out into the desert. It had been something to see, how at home he looked among his people, how he seemed to know just what to say to everyone.

Din had found it hard to keep his eyes off the people flitting in and out of the town square, calling greetings to each other, slapping Cobb on the back, catching up the children running barefoot across the sand and swinging them through the air as they giggled.

Cobb kept looking over his shoulder as they headed out into the desert, toward the higher ground where they might find the Tuskens. Din pretended not to notice.

It hadn’t been hard to find the Tuskens, and Din was pleasantly surprised at the friendship between them and Cobb. Cobb signed greetings, the Tuskens hoisted their rifles into the air and howled with the happy tones of a meeting with honored guests, and when the gourd was passed around, Cobb didn’t hesitate to drink.

(Cara, for her part, choked it down without complaint, but shot Din an accusatory glance when she had passed it on.)

After that, it had fallen to Din to communicate exactly what they wanted from the Tuskens, and what they were willing to offer in exchange. 

When he had finished, the Tuskens had fallen silent, looking to the leader of the clan, who sat beside the fire deep in thought. Finally, he stood, raised his rifle, and shouted an agreement.

“Well, that’s one thing accomplished,” Cara had said, nudging him with her elbow.

_ If only the rest of it could be as easy _ , Din thought but did not say.

***

Three days after they had left Fett’s palace, Din found himself near the top of a ridge on the Dune Sea near Mos Chanda, lying on his stomach and watching the horizon with a pair of binocs. Cara and Cobb were on either side of him, and a group of nearly silent, watchful Tuskens surrounded them.

The ridge sloped down to a flat, sandy stretch, then back up again to another ridge, where another group of Tuskens was waiting. Fennec had managed to get in with some of the workers at the port in Mos Chanda and had discovered found out the route that couriers took to the Stellar Bank from the nearby city of Mos Targen. This was the only way a speeder transport could get through the mountains between the cities.

It was the perfect place for an ambush.

The only problem was that the couriers working for the Stellar Bank almost certainly knew that. But they were ready to defend themselves from a small group of Tusken raiders, rather than the full number of clan warriors that Din had convinced to help him. They would come down on the couriers with a force nearly two-hundred-strong.

Poor bastards.

Cobb fidgeted beside him. “How much longer are we going to have to wait?”

Din shrugged, keeping his binocs focused on the horizon. “Could be a few hours. Could be a few days.” Cobb made a startled sound, and Din smiled in the safe cover of his helmet.

He was about to say something else when a black dot appeared on the horizon. Din tensed and stared hard through the binocs.

“Do you see it?” Cara murmured.

Din narrowed his eyes as the dot got bigger and resolved itself into a moderately sized speeder transport. “That’s it,” he said, and turned to the leader of the Tusken clan, sitting behind him behind the cover of a rock. He signed to him, and the Tusken nodded and took a small light signaler from his cloak.

The signal was answered by the Tuskens on the other side of the valley, and Din heard the rustling of robes behind him as the Tuskens got ready for their attack. He kept himself pressed into the stone, touching his hand to his blaster at his hip just to reassure himself.

The speeder transport got closer and closer, until he could hear the whine of its engines and see it with his naked eyes. No one spoke or moved, everyone tense and waiting. Din ground his teeth.

Finally, when the speeder transport was so close that Din was worried it would pass them by, the leader gave a tremendous howl from behind him, so loud that it made his ears ring and echoed across the valley. After that, it was all movement.

Din pushed himself up off the ground and fired up his jetpack, rocketing down the slope ahead of the wave of Tuskens that were running toward the valley and the transport. A similar wave was pouring down the other side. 

Some of the Tuskens, the sharpshooters, went to one knee and aimed their rifles. Many of the shots made ineffectual  _ ping _ noises as they bounced off the plated hull of the transport, but some of them hit between the plates or on the underside of the vehicle, and as the shots continued to rain down, the hull started to buckle and smoke.

The transport sped up, the couriers clearly wanting to make a break for it, and Din arced over the top of the transport and set himself down in front of it, raising his blaster. If they held their nerve, they could have just run him down and kept going, probably without even losing much speed, but the pilot of the transport, already spooked by the Tusken attack, turned so sharply that he dug the nose of the transport into the sand.

By the time the pilot got the transport under control, the Tuskens had reached the valley floor and were moving to surround it. The transport straightened itself out and Din winged a blaster bolt across the front of it, striking a glancing, smoking blow off the nose of the transport.

That, apparently, took all the fight out of the transport crew. The transport slowed to a stop, in a ring of Tuskens, all watching it closely and holding their rifles up and ready to fire.

The door to the transport opened, and a man in the uniform of a courier company got out, holding a blaster in one shaking hand. “G-Get out of the way!” he stammered, raising his chin defiantly. “We’re armed!”

“We’re not here for you,” Din called back. “We’re here for your transport.”

“Sure, and you’re just going to let us go?” the man answered, sarcastically, but his hand holding the blaster lowered just slightly. 

“We have an agreement with these Tuskens,” Din said. “We’ll take your transport and uniform, and the Tuskens will hold you prisoner for three hours. Then they’ll escort you to the outskirts of Mos Chanda and let you go.” He signed to the leader of the clan, who made a sound of agreement.

“You…” The man looked around the circle of Tuskens. “Why would you do that?”

“Like I said, we’re not here for you.”

There was a long silence as the man considered it. Din waited him out, staring him down, the Tuskens all around him as still as he was.

Finally, the man set his blaster down on the sand and gestured to someone still in the transport. Another man climbed out, and both held their hands up. “We surrender!” the first man shouted.

Din smiled. Cara caught his eye across the circle of Tuskens and winked. 

One step closer.

***

It took the Tuskens only a few moments to unload the transport. There were twelve crates on board the transport, and each was opened and emptied, the cases of credits and bags of spice inside roped together, ready to be carried back to where they’d left the clan’s banthas.

The empty crates were then filled with sand. The Tuskens conferred with each other in low, murmuring voices, adding more sand or taking some out until they felt they had matched the weight properly before the crates were reloaded onto the transport.

Finally, only one crate remained empty. Din looked at it, considering the space, or rather, lack thereof.

“Well,” Cara said, straightening the cap of the courier uniform she’d pulled on. “We’re ready to go.”

Din looked at Cobb, in the other courier’s uniform, in surprise. “What are you doing?”

“There were two people in the transport,” Cobb answered with a shrug and a grin. “It’ll look suspicious if we don’t show up with two.”

“We wanted your help with the Tuskens,” Din answered. “Your bit’s done.”

Cobb’s face hardened. “This is my planet,” he said simply. “The Empire’s not welcome here. Not anymore.”

Din considered the other man, then nodded. “Another gun’s always welcome,” he said, and Cobb brightened again.

That left Din, and the empty crate. He sighed. “Nothing for it,” he muttered, and stepped into the crate. He curled up as tightly as he could, and crammed himself into the box.

“You’re going to feel like shit when you get out of that thing,” Cara said, looking over the top of the crate at Din where he lay in the fetal position, head ducked and arms around his knees.

“Then let’s get this over with as quickly as we can,” Din answered.

Cara smiled and lifted the lid of the box. “See you on the other side,” she said, and fitted the lid over the top of the crate.

The box was not airtight, thankfully, and a tiny sliver of light got in around the edges of the crate’s lid. Nonetheless, it was about as uncomfortable as Din had ever been in his life. He took a deep breath and tried to make himself go boneless and limp as the crate was lifted and set back into the transport.

He’d been in worse positions, of course. He’d been shot, and punched, and thrown across rooms, and hit by a rampaging mudhorn, and burned, and concussed. He’d had broken bones and deep cuts and all the other risks that came with being a bounty hunter. On the surface, having to take a transport ride in a crate shouldn’t be upsetting. It should be downright relaxing compared to everything else he’d done.

He had, unfortunately, failed to count on a sudden resurgence of bad memories.

The box was so close, and so dark, and it reminded him of nothing so much as the bunker that his parents had hidden him in when their home had been overrun. 

It wasn’t the same thing. It was an absurd, nonsensical reaction. But, to his dismay, he found his heart speeding up, sweat prickling along his hairline. He had to struggle to keep his breathing steady.

Some part of him expected the lid to be peeled back, an enormous war droid on the other side, aiming an arm cannon at him.

_ Stop _ , he told himself sternly.  _ Remember where you are. You have a job to do _ .

He took deep breaths, and reminded himself that Cara and Cobb were just a few feet away, piloting the transport, and kept his body as limp as he could.

He only had to survive this journey. An hour at most.

Then he could get back to the discomfort he was used to. The good, expected kind.

***

Din got himself through the journey to the Stellar Bank’s dock by deep breathing and deep thinking about every aspect of the plan. He’d run through it, minute by minute, probably half a hundred times by the time they reached their destination. 

The slowing of the transport made Din’s heart speed up again. The transport came to a stop, and he heard Cara’s and Cobb’s voices talking to the port guards beyond.

“What the hell happened to you?” someone asked.

“Tuskens,” Cara responded, sounding rueful. “Our first time doing this run, they said we’d only get a couple at most. There were probably thirty out there!”

“There were probably less,” the port guard answered, voice smug. “You just got spooked and overcounted. All you had to do was speed up, right? They’re not so hard to deal with.”

He could hear Cara grumbling as she marched around the transport to open the back. Cobb said, voice full of wonder, “I know I was spooked! Never thought anything like that would happen to me!”

Din bit his lip to keep from laughing.

He heard the back of the transport open, and then the sound of the crates around him moving, being dragged to the open back and lifted out. He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, relaxing every muscle as his crate was lifted and set down again onto a maglev cart. If he moved, he might give the game away.

“Alright, that should do it,” one of the port guards said. He heard the clinking of credits changing hands, and then the cart he was on began moving, away from Cara and Cobb. 

The light coming in from around the edges of the crate’s lid abruptly dimmed. He was inside. 

He carefully tilted his wrist so that he could see the signal token attached to his gauntlet. After a long moment, the token lit up.

_ Minute zero _ , he thought.

***

Cara made herself look busy, moving around the transport as though she was checking it over. She brushed her fingers over her rifle, stowed under the pilot’s seat of the transport, and kept her hands close to it. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the port workers with the maglev cart as they vanished into the building, carrying Din with them. She took a deep breath and counted seconds until she reached one minute.

Then she reached a hand into her pocket and pressed the signal token to activate it.

_ Minute zero _ , she thought.

***

Fennec moved through the foyer of the Stellar Bank of the Rim’s public building, looking idly at the art and sculptures and furniture, brushing her fingers over particularly opulent things and carefully leaving behind tiny homing beacons all around the room. She stopped in front of a particularly garish statue, cocking her head as though she was deep in thought about it.

Idly, she toyed with the signal token as though it was just a meaningless bauble, turning it over and over in her hand.

And then the light went on.

Fennec grinned.  _ Minute zero _ , she thought, and turned around. “There’s a bomb, everyone get down!” she shouted, and ducked to the ground as one wall of the building blew up.

***

Mayfeld waited on the roof of the empty building Fennec had found for him, watching the Stellar Bank through the scope of his gun. He had seen Fennec go in, and there didn’t seem to have been any problems. All he needed was to wait for the signal.

All around him, the repurposed Imperial probe droids that Fett had provided him rested on the ground on standby, the lights of their eyes a waiting amber.

Mayfeld had no idea where Fett had even gotten the things. There was a weird, queasy familiarity to them that put Mayfeld at ease and kind of made him hate himself for it. He patted one of them absently on its round head, like it was a loth-cat or something similar. He couldn’t keep himself from glancing at the signal token he’d set in front of him. The waiting had always been the hardest part.

And then the signal token lit up.

_ Minute zero _ , he thought. “Activate,” he said, and the probe droids’ eyes lit red. They sped off toward the Stellar Bank and the homing beacons that Fennec had placed.

Mayfeld put his eye to the gun scope again, waiting for his targets.

***

Whatever Shand and Mayfeld were doing at the other building, it was loud. The sounds of explosions, of crumbling brick, of people yelling, all came clearly over the wind to where Cobb stood next to Marshall Dune and waited for their moment.

He could feel the nervousness rattling through the dock guards. They shifted, they touched their ears, they spoke into commlinks at their wrists, they looked at each other seriously. Cobb watched them. Beside him, Marshall Dune did the same.

Finally, a man in the guard uniform of the bank ducked around the edge of the building from the front, gesturing to the dock guards, who drew their weapons and ran after him, heading toward the other building. Only two guards were left at the door leading into the vault building from the dock.

Cobb carefully reached under his seat in the transport to retrieve his blaster. Across the cockpit from him, Cara was doing the same, drawing her rifle out slowly.

“Minute zero?” Cobb whispered to her.

Cara grinned back. “Minute one,” she corrected, then pulled her rifle from the cockpit and wheeled on the remaining guards.

***

Din knew the moment he’d passed into the cage because the signal token in his hand went out. He took a deep breath within the crate. He was on his own.

He held perfectly still, running through old meditations and mantras he’d been taught as a foundling.

Finally, though, he felt the maglev cart he’d been placed on come to a stop, then the weird weightless feeling of being lifted by a lev-crane. The box he was in made a soft  _ clunk _ as it was placed on the floor. He listened as closely as he could until he’d gone a full minute without hearing any sounds of movement from beyond the crate’s walls.

Then he carefully lifted the lid of the crate an inch or so and peered out. 

He seemed to be in a long, low-ceilinged room that was packed with boxes in ordered rows and columns. He didn’t see anyone else in the room with him, so he raised the lid still higher and jumped out of the crate, drawing his blaster.

There was no one else in the vault. Din breathed a sigh of relief. The plan had gone right that far, at least.

One step in front of the other. All he had to do at that moment was find the cage. The rest would come after.

He made his way cautiously to the door of the vault, sliding the short-range EMP that Fett had given him from his belt and setting it against the lock, starting the timer. He crossed to the other side of the room, out of its range. There was no explosion, or anything really to indicate that anything had changed; there was just a chime to indicate the pulse was imminent, then a crackle of electricity, then silence.

_ If that didn’t work _ , Din thought ruefully,  _ someone’s going to be very surprised the next time they open this door _ .

He reached for the door and twisted the handle. To his immense relief, it twisted, and the door slid open with a silence that was unsettling given the weight of the door.  _ Right again, Fett _ , Din thought as he dislodged the pulse from the door and slid it back into a pouch on his belt.

Beyond the door of the vault was a hallway that stretched in either direction. A flick of Din’s eyes called up a compass readout in the corner of his visor display; he started down the hallway in the direction of the back of the building.

According to the time display in his visor, Fennec and Mayfeld should already have set off the probe droid attack on the main Bank building. Most of the guards in the vault building should already be heading in that direction. Hopefully. With the cage still up and running, though, he had no way to communicate with his companions, to check that things were still going smoothly in the world outside. He just had to keep to his part of the plan, and to trust.

There wasn’t anyone else in the hall running alongside the vault, and the walls were thick enough that he couldn’t hear anything beyond. He kept himself going in the same direction as much as he could as the hallway wound, avoided taking any offshoots, traveling always toward the back of the building.

Finally, he rounded a corner and saw what he was looking for. The mesh of the cage was stretched across a solid mud-brick wall, and there appeared to be a narrow maintenance hallway that arced around to follow it on either side, so that no section of the mesh was unreachable for repair. Or, of course, for sabotage.

Fennec had told him that anywhere on the surface of the mesh would work; all that was required was that he disrupt its electromagnetic effects. He pulled a small explosive from his belt and affixed it to the bottom of the mesh, where it met the floor. Then he stepped back, and back a little more, just to be safe, and triggered the explosive.

He didn’t even need to wait for the smoke to clear to know that it had worked. The commlink on his gauntlet started flashing green before becoming a solid light. He pressed the button to connect and suddenly heard Cara’s voice in his ear. “Is that you? Did it work?”

Din took quick stock of the damage. The explosive had done well, tearing up a chunk of the mesh about as big as Din’s breastplate and taking a piece out of the wall behind. “It worked,” Din said with satisfaction. “They’ll already know that something’s happened.”

“We’re on our way,” Cara answered. Din thought he could hear the smile in her voice.

***

Elsewhere, Boba Fett flew Din’s ship over the buildings of Mos Chanda, angling it toward the roof of the vault building. He was confident; he had pulled more difficult jobs when he was twelve. Maybe in the aftermath he’d offer to help the Stellar Bank put in better security. For a steep fee, of course.

Elsewhere, Fennec Shand rolled to her feet, two concealed guns falling from her sleeves and into her hands, and ducked into the cover of some of the rubble of the fallen wall, peering over it and taking aim.

Elsewhere, Mayfeld waited until the guard reinforcements were clustered close together at the door to the Stellar Bank building and opened fire with the stun bolts loaded into his sniper rifle.

Elsewhere, in space, an Imperial transport pulled out of hyperspace. Workers and pilots milled around its hangar, prepping a small cohort of TIE fighters to fly.

Elsewhere, on the ground, across the street from the Stellar Bank’s hidden vault, a person dressed head to toe in black, with a black helmet and mask, was waiting for a signal.

The commlink in the person’s ear came to life. “We’re in position, Agent Slate,” said a voice. “Deploying TIEs now.”

The person drew their blaster and headed for the vault building, slow and steady, as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

***

The chaos from the other building was enough that Din only met a few guards on his way back in the direction of the loading dock to meet Cara and Cobb. All of them were easily dispatched. As he hurried through the building, he spread the electromagnetic sensors in his helmet as far as they would go, looking for the spike in electricity usage that would indicate some kind of computer or control room.

There it was, appearing as a red blur on his periphery. He stopped and set a sonic amplifier against the wall, triggering it to send soundwaves out into the spaces of the building. A moment later, a grainy, blurry, but functional schematic of the building was displayed in the corner of his visor.

He heard shots and shouting, and Cara and Cobb came around a corner, guns drawn. “Alright,” Cara said as soon as she saw him, “Fennec and Mayfeld took some of the heat off, but there are still guards here, and there’ll be more coming now that they know what we’re really doing.”

“I know where we’re going,” Din answered, and gestured for them to get behind him. He led the way forward, trying to take up as much space in the narrow hallways as he could, to shield them with his beskar if necessary.

The door to the control room gave way under a shot from Cara’s rifle, and Din kicked the remains away and dove into the room, sending a few stun bolts at the movement he caught out of the corner of his eye. Two guards went down, a third was sent to the ground by Cobb’s gun, and then it was just the three of them, a massive computer system taking up three walls, and a trembling man in very fine clothes standing at the center of it all.

“W-What,” the man stammered. He had his hands up as though warding them away, and didn’t seem to be armed. “W-What are you doing?”

“I can stun you if it’ll look better to your bosses,” Din said shortly. “Otherwise, just sit down and shut up.”

The man sat down immediately. Cara pulled the drive with the exfiltration program from her pocket and twirled it around her fingers. “Time to go to work.” She headed for the control panel.   
  


“I don’t understand what you’re doing,” the man on the floor said. “You don’t need to get into the computers to find the vault.”

“Not concerned,” Din answered, watching as Cara plugged the drive in. “Already been there.”

The man furrowed his brow at Din, then turned and saw what Cara was doing. All the color drained from his face, and when he spoke again, he sounded panicked. “Wait, you don’t need to do that! I can tell you where the vault is! I can get you into it, even!”

Din turned away from what Cara was doing to look at the man, narrowing his eyes. He was very pale, obviously sweating, twisting his hands together in front of himself. “What do you think we’ll find on your computers,” Din said slowly, “that frightens you?”

“Nothing!” the man answered, too quickly and too loudly. “There’s nothing there to find! I’m only afraid because a trio of insane people is holding me hostage!”

Cobb snorted and leveled his gun on the man. “Now why don’t I believe that?”

“You…” The man darted glances between Din and Cara, his face going red and screwing up with anger and fear. “You have no idea what you’re doing! You have no idea…”

Cara turned away from the computer. “Well, it’s in. Should be doing what Fennec said it would.”

Din kept his attention on the man. “If I don’t understand, why don’t you tell me what I should know? Enlighten me.”

The man opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. Din waited him out.

“Okay, fine,” the man finally said. “There’s…”

He didn’t finish. A shot came from the doorway, and a blaster bolt hit the man in the head. He went down heavily, dead eyes wide and staring.

“Get down!” Din shouted, and threw himself to the floor.

He had time to realize that there was no good cover in the room, time to start thinking about his next movement, time to check to make sure that Cara and Cobb hadn’t been hit, and time to see a figure in black standing in the doorway. He had a couple of seconds, and then the person in the doorway threw something into the room.

Everything went white.

When everything stopped being white, it went black instead.

The electronics in his helmet were out. There must have been some kind of EMP pulse. He attempted to reach up to touch his helmet, to reboot it, but he couldn’t move. He could think about moving, but it didn’t translate into actual movement, just twitches at the ends of his fingers.

He felt someone grab him under the arms and lift him, dragging him away. Every instinct told him to fight, to keep struggling to move until he managed it. He forced himself to be still, instead.

He was in trouble, and the only way out of it was to bide his time, and pick his moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you tell the reader what the plan is, that means that the plan has to go wrong. Them's the rules :)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all, why is everyone in Star Wars horribly traumatized, an orphan, or both?

Din was pretty sure he hadn’t been dragged very far; the leftover effects of the pulse and the fact that the electronics in his visor hadn’t come back online made it difficult for him to accurately count the seconds as they went by. In any case, it didn’t feel as though it had been long when the person dragging him came to a stop and set him down, surprisingly gently, with his back propped up against a wall.

Distantly, there were the sounds of weapons firing and explosions, even perhaps of ship engines, but they were muffled as if through thick walls. His helmet, with all of its electronics off, had become a tomb.

“I won’t take your helmet off,” a voice said. A human man’s voice. “I know about the Watch’s creed. But I’ll just…” A hand felt along the edge of Din’s helmet, and he tensed as much as he could, but his helmet wasn’t lifted off. Instead, the reboot switch was triggered, a  _ fuzz _ sound crackled in his ears, and his visor came back to life.

Din took stock of things. He was inside a building, but not any space he recognized from his rush through the Stellar Bank’s vault building. The room he was in was small, and the only light came in through a small window set high up the wall. He could see other buildings, or at least their roofs, through it.

There had been a low commercial building across the street from the vault building, abandoned. They hadn’t come very far.

His muscles still weren’t obeying his commands. He couldn’t turn his head to look at his wrist, but he knew what he’d see; the commlink was offline. It would need to be rebooted, too. He focused and found that he could almost move his hands; he could flex and straighten his fingers. If he could just bring them together, could he reboot the comms?

A person stepped into his field of view, a person dressed in a black tunic and trousers, black gloves and boots, and a black helmet and mask. Din clenched his teeth against anger and fear.

With a tremendous effort of will, he forced his mouth to open, forced himself to form the word, “Slate.” His voice sounded like it was being dragged over broken glass.

“You know me. Of course you do.” Agent Slate shook his head, gave a short, sharp laugh. “I knew you’d be able to track us to the Stellar Bank, after you showed up on Gollon. My superior officer thought I was giving you too much credit, but I knew.”

“What...” Din ground out. He tried to move his arms, or at least sit up a little farther, but all he managed to do was slump his head awkwardly to the side.

“Yes, I imagine you’re not feeling well. Those charges pack a pretty powerful stun pulse, in addition to the EMP. I thought this place would be good enough for us to wait for our ride.” The man reached up and pulled off his mask. “So we can have a conversation.”

Agent Slate was… ordinary. Ordinary and young. Human, with olive skin, dark hair and eyes, probably not more than a couple of years over twenty. He was also smiling as though he’d won a game, his eyes sparkling with excitement. It made Din nervous. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected from an Imperial agent, but this wasn’t it.

“I knew you were the real thing, not just an imposter in stolen armor,” Slate said, his fingers drumming with frantic energy on the mask he held in his hands. “I can’t wear mine on missions like this, it would draw too much attention, but you can tell, can’t you? You know what I am.”

It took Din a moment to understand what Slate was saying. What horrible thing he was trying to convey. “No,” he forced himself to say. His stomach twisted. He felt like he was watching the scene from somewhere far away, like it was happening to someone else.

“Don’t…” Slate began, cutting himself off with a snarl and tightening his grip on the mask. The anger in his face melted away and replaced itself with cheerfulness again with alarming rapidity. “Don’t say things like that. You’re a foundling, I know that from Gideon’s reports. A foundling of Mandalorians who fled the Purge. But there were Mandalorians who remained loyal, no matter what happened, and because of their loyalty they were rewarded. Those Mandalorians took foundlings, too.” Slate crouched down in front of Din, staring through his visor as though he could meet his eyes. “We’re practically brothers, you understand? That’s why I had to talk to you.”

“Not…” Din ground his teeth, started again, struggling to get words out through his uncooperative jaw. “I don’t… serve the Empire. The butcher of my people.”

“ _ Some _ of our people,” Slate answered, with careful emphasis, “betrayed their promises. They made oaths to the Empire, and they betrayed them! So of course they were punished. But that’s all past. It’s all past, you understand?”

“So is the Empire,” Din answered. It was becoming easier to speak. It was also, he noticed, becoming easier to move his fingers in his gloves. With a twitch, he realized that he could move his arms in their sockets, just a little bit.

Slate shook his head. “The Empire is dead. It didn’t survive the Emperor. That is how it  _ should _ be! You can’t have an Empire without an Emperor! But that’s not important. It’s not  _ about _ the Empire. It’s about the future.”

“The future?” Din laughed, watched Slate’s face flush. It was a risk, antagonizing him; it could wind him up and throw him off his game, make him spend more time monologuing and trying to explain himself, which was what Din wanted. It could also, if he got it wrong, make Slate decide that Din wasn’t worth his time and put a blaster bolt in his skull, just as he’d done to the man in the Bank. It was a fine line to walk, and Din watched Slate carefully as he went on. “You’re going to rebuild the Empire with a bunch of unprocessed ore?”

“Aren’t you  _ listening _ ?” Slate said. “It’s not about the Empire. The Empire is gone, and anyway it was the least of what Emperor Palpatine wanted to create. His vision was something different. His vision has deep roots, and what will grow from them can’t be stopped. I’m offering you a chance to come with me and serve the future. Everyone’s future, including Mandalore’s! Isn’t that worth something?”

He turned and looked at Din, his eyes wide and shining with excitement that seemed to have not an ounce of happiness in it. Din knew, with a sinking feeling, that he’d seen people like this before, knew them, even, in the Covert. He was poorly forged. One of the Armorer’s favorite sayings drifted to the front of his mind.  _ When you quench steel too hot, it cracks and warps and becomes brittle. The same happens to people. _

Din just had to make sure that when this fanatic snapped, it wasn’t with a blaster pointed at Din.

“You really believe all that?” Din said, to buy time. The returning feeling and sensation was spreading up his arms; if he could just reboot his comms, he could give his companions somewhere to look for him.

“I do,” Slate said, coming close to Din again, leaning over him.

Din took his chance. He wrenched his body forward with all the energy he could gather. If he had actually been intending to try to hit Slate, it would have been a pathetic effort; all he could manage was to lift his shoulders an inch away from the wall, raise his arms just enough that it hurt when they hit the floor again. He flopped back like a puppet with its strings cut, but when he did, it was with his arms twisted together behind him.

Slate laughed delightedly. “See, that’s it! My superior officers don’t understand why recruiting Mandalorians is a good idea, but I know. We’re something special. There is no one like us in the galaxy. Listen to me, Din Djarin.” Slate leaned forward, eyes bright. Just as he had when Gideon said it, Din felt a wave of revulsion at hearing his name come out of an Imperial’s mouth.

The fact that the Imperial was a Mandalorian just made it so much worse.

“I’m listening,” Din said, letting himself sound as grudging as he felt. He moved his hands against each other behind his back, carefully. Finally, he got a finger against the reboot switch for his commlink and pressed it. Voices in his ear, the voices of his companions shouting to each other. He ignored them, refused to let himself get distracted. “Although you’ll have to be quick. Aren’t we just across the street from the bank? You can’t expect to stay here long without someone finding you.”

The voices in his ear went silent for a shocked second, then came back, shouting even more insistently. He flicked his eyes across the controls in his visor to mute them. He couldn’t afford to be distracted. He kept his attention on Slate.

“TIEs are incoming,” Slate said. “Don’t worry about me, I’m getting a lift out of here. You’ll be coming with me. You don’t really have any other options. No one’s going to come and get you. Those bounty hunters you hired have almost certainly run away and abandoned you by now. There’s no honor among those types. Not to worry, though. What Emperor Palpatine has planned for the galaxy is something that will last forever. You could be part of that. It would be more valuable than anything else you’ve ever done.”

Din felt a sudden flash of pure rage.  _ More valuable than anything else I’ve ever done? _ he thought, his mind lighting up white-hot. He had saved the kid, he had saved  _ Grogu _ , from Gideon. He had delivered him safely to someone who could train him. He had lifted him up and held him to his chest when he was scared. He had sat for hours, after their encounter with Tano, letting Grogu take the little silver ball from his hand and float it across the space between them. He had told him, every time, that he had done well.

He had done all that. How dare this wild-eyed fanatic tell him there was anything else he could do that would be more valuable?

As quickly as the rage had spiked, it died, banked down like coals, burning him and making him narrow his eyes at Slate.

“What do you think will grow from those deep roots?” Din asked, his voice low, barely over a whisper. Slate crouched in front of him and leaned in to catch his words. “What future do you think you’ll be creating?” As he asked, he carefully moved his hands together behind his back.

The anger had sent adrenaline through him, bringing his muscles back under his control faster. He had enough coordination to open the tiny compartment at his gauntlet and remove one of the fingernail-sized devices stored there.

Slate leaned even closer to him. “A beautiful future. That’s what I expect to create. A future of order and perfection, where everyone and everything is in its right place. We can make this galaxy a machine, in which nothing ever goes wrong again. And I…”

Din didn’t let him finish. Slate lifted one hand, as if to reach toward Din, and Din saw his chance. He shoved himself away from the wall again, with more coordination this time, and slammed his forehead into the place between Slate’s eyes, feeling Slate’s helmet clang against his own. He threw his hands out and grabbed at Slate’s wrists.

Slate yanked his arms out of the way and wrenched himself backward, out of reach. Too late. Din had managed to snag the edge of one of Slate’s sleeves, and to press the device into the fabric before letting go. 

Din forced himself up against the wall, even as his body wanted to sag back to the floor. He stumbled toward the door of the room.

Slate shook his head, but regained his equilibrium quickly. He stood, his eyes cold and entirely flat, all hint of his previous excitement gone. “I suppose I should take that as your answer,” he said, drawing his blaster. Din got his hand on his own blaster, drew it, too slow, so much slower than he usually would. It wouldn’t be fast enough.

He could hear voices from outside the building, the sudden explosion of footsteps, and then the door was knocked off its hinges and into the room. Two blaster bolts in quick succession came from its direction: one hit Slate in the side of the head, the other hit him in the chest, and the Imperial agent went down.

And then he pushed himself back up, his face red with rage, his blaster somehow still in his hand. He ducked deeper into the building. Din didn’t stick around to see what he’d do next. He darted out into the street and found his companions waiting for him.

“Damn it,” Mayfeld said, lowering the two blasters he was holding, one in each hand. “I should have aimed for his eye. I didn’t expect his fucking armor to be that good!”

Fennec’s eyes widened and she said, “Explosive incoming!”

The five of them threw themselves away from the doorway, arms over their heads; a moment later, the doorway splintered and cracked, and the world became pressure and ringing in Din’s ears.

“Din! Are you alright?” someone said in his ear, right beside his helmet. Din turned his head and squinted through his visor at Cara’s frantic face. Wood shrapnel from the door had cut one cheek and a few places on her arms.

“I’m fine,” Din said, forcing himself up onto his hands and knees. “Where’s Slate?”

“He’s gone,” Fennec answered. “Explosion covered his escape.”

“Then let’s get the hell out of here!” Cobb shouted.

The street was littered with bits of stone and metal, most of them smoking. As his hearing returned, Din could hear the familiar sound of TIE fighters wheeling. They had apparently done a strafing run on the vault building. The roof had almost completely collapsed, and Din’s ship was notably nowhere in sight.

“Where’s Fett?” Din asked.

“I’m trying to lose some unwanted company,” Fett’s voice answered in his ear. “Nice of you to join us.”

Din squinted at the horizon, and caught the familiar silhouette of his ship, weaving and rolling in a way that made him wince. It would almost certainly result in overload damage to the stabilizers. Did Boba even know how to fly something that didn’t have the power and maneuverability of a  _ Firespray _ -class?

“Your ship is bantha shit at turning!” Fett shouted, and as Din watched, his ship was wrenched around, whining loud enough that he could hear it over the sound of the TIE engines. One of the TIEs, trying to match the arc of the turn, lost control and slammed into the ground. The other took a more sedate turn and resumed its pursuit. “Can you make it to the well on the edge of town?” Fett’s voice came again.

“We’ll be there,” Din answered, and he and his companions started running. All caution was thrown to the winds; at that point, the only thing that mattered was speed.

And that was before Din heard a far-off whine coming from above them.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Mayfeld’s voice came over the comms. “More TIEs?”

Din could see the TIEs, rapidly growing black dots in the clear sky. It would be less than a minute before they were close enough to the ground to fire their guns, another thirty seconds or so before they could get a lock on their targets.

Or maybe they wouldn’t even bother choosing targets. Maybe they’d just raze Mos Chanda. Maker knew they’d already done enough damage in the course of this debacle. Din offered a silent apology to the people of the city.

The buildings parted, and the square containing the well opened up before them. Most of the animals had broken their ties and fled at the sounds of the chaos from deeper in the city; all that remained was a pair of belligerent-looking banthas, who regarded Din and his companions with suspicion as they entered the space, the whites of their eyes showing.

They tilted their heads back and bellowed at the sky when Fett began bringing Din’s ship in toward the ground.

There wasn’t a space to land, that much was obvious; the lip of the well came up to Din’s hip, and the pool was deeper than ground level. The ship came to a hovering stop, the wind from its engines kicking the water up into swirling whitecaps, and the gangway began to lower.

Din raised his arm and fired his grappling cord at the gangway, managing to snag the edge of the platform. He unhooked the other end of the cord from his armor and held it out to Cara, who took it without a word and started climbing. Cobb, Fennec, and Mayfeld were right behind her, and Din gestured them up the cord, nervously glancing between the magnetic end where it was attached to the gangway, hoping it wouldn’t give way, and the sky, hoping the TIEs wouldn’t get close enough to shoot them. There was no cover, and his cord wasn’t designed to hold more than one or two people at a time…

For once, luck was on his side, and his companions made it to the ship, pulling themselves over the edge and into the hold, before the TIEs could get low enough to fire. Din reattached the cord to his gauntlets and retracted it, shooting up into the air and colliding with the underside of the gangway.

He hauled himself over the edge and into the ship, Cara grabbing him by the arm to pull him the rest of the way, and slammed the button to close the gangway. “We’re all in!” he shouted over the comms to Fett. “Get us out of here!”

Fett didn’t waste any time; the gangway hadn’t even closed all the way before the ship was moving, throwing Din and the others against the wall as it turned more sharply than was advisable and arced up over the city. Din could hear the sound of the TIEs’ weapons even through the hull, and as soon as the gangway was closed and the hold was secure, he took the ladder up into the crewed section of the ship as quickly as he could, running for the cockpit.

“There’s two down here, but I have no idea how many are still in space,” Fett shouted to him as he threw himself down in the copilot’s chair.

“Can you get us out over the Dune Sea?” Din asked, flipping the switch to transfer the weapons controls from the pilot to the copilot. Fett had enough to think about. “We can find somewhere to hide out there.”

Fett was already shaking his head. “They’re too close and too fast, we’d never be able to lose them long enough to hide. We need to get away from them before they get reinforcements here.”

Din felt a sinking feeling in his chest. He had asked them all for their help, and now he was asking them… “What do we do?” he asked, already guessing the answer.

“All we have to do is outrun them until we’re clear of the atmosphere,” Fett answered, yanking back on the steering to steepen their ascent. “Then we can jump clear.”

Easier said than done. His ship had a very rudimentary shield, but from the way it was rocking with each impact of the TIEs’ weapons, it had already gone down. The reinforced hull was good, but wouldn’t hold forever. “Swiveling,” he said, triggering the gun’s rotation from front to back and laying down covering fire.

“We’re hitting atmosphere,” Fett said. Din watched the TIEs weave through the air behind them on the rear screen, looking at them so closely that he was startled when Fett cursed. “There’s the reinforcements!”

Din looked out the front viewscreen and saw _ five _ TIEs descending toward them, and behind them, a little ways past Tattooine’s moon, the bulk of an Imperial transport ship lurking.

“No time to get all the way clear,” he said. “We’ve got to make the jump now or we’ll be splattered across the Dune Sea.”

“Might be hard on the ship,” Fett said carefully.

Din felt an unexpected pang.  _ It’s just a ship _ , he told himself sternly. He didn’t even like it very much. “It’s the only way,” he said. He touched the commlink at his wrist and said, “Everyone brace for a rough ride!”

The TIEs were even closer. He saw the flashes of green, their weapons firing, but before the shots could reach them, everything stretched and elongated, and the next moment, with a rattle that traveled along the length of the ship and a disconcerting whine from the engines, they were in hyperspace.

“Well,” Fett said, sitting back in his chair. His voice sounded almost happy. “That was something.”

***

By some kind of silent agreement, they all ended up gathering in the canteen, which didn’t have enough chairs but at least had a caf maker. Din was going to run out of caf at that rate, he reflected as he started it brewing. 

“So,” Fennec said, breaking the silence first. “I take it you weren’t planning on those Imps showing up?”

“It was Slate, with reinforcements,” Din said, wishing he could take off his helmet and grind the heels of his hands into his eyes. With the adrenaline of the job and the escape draining out of him, he wanted nothing more than to sit down, or even better, to sleep. “He must have suspected we’d get to the Bank, with what we found on Gollon.”

“I need to report this to the New Republic,” Cara said, looking as exhausted as Din felt. “As soon as we get… wherever we’re going. Where are we going?” she looked at Fett.

He shrugged. He’d taken his helmet off, and Din thought he looked uncomfortable, which made Din nervous. “I just programmed the first route that came to my mind.”

“Which was what?” Cara pressed.

“Planet I used to spend some time on,” he said. He paused, then admitted, like it was being dragged out of him, “It’s called Kamino.”

Fennec raised an eyebrow at him, which he ignored.

“Didn’t the Empire blow that planet up?” Mayfeld asked. “Before my time, but I think it was for treason?”

“Like I said,” Fett answered, a little tightly, “I used to spend time there. I’ve got a refuel and resupply base on one of the moons. It’s pretty safe, since no one goes there anymore.”

“And after that?” Cobb asked quietly.

Din glanced at him and saw that he was paler than usual. He felt a stab of remorse. This wasn’t what Cobb had signed up for. He hadn’t wanted to leave his home behind. “I’m planning to follow Slate. It’s still my job to do. We can get you and Fett and Fennec back to Tattooine before I take off.”

“Will the Empire still be there?” Cobb asked.

“No,” Cara said firmly. “The New Republic has been informed, they’ll send someone to chase them off.”

“They’ll send someone to Tattooine?” Fennec asked, raising an eyebrow. “All the way out to the wastelands at the edge?”

“They’ll send someone,” Cara answered, but after a moment, she sighed and shook her head. “They’ll send whoever they can, I know that much. But not enough to set up any kind of real presence there.”

“So the Imps could still be watching, right? They could still have spies there,” Cobb pressed.

“You can count on the fact that they do,” Fett answered.

That was all Cobb needed to hear, apparently. Without any hesitation, he said, “Then I’m staying with you for the moment, Mando.”

“Mos Pelgo,” Din began.

Cobb cut him off. “The Imps probably didn’t know who I am, right? I always wore the armor before. Not to, ah,” he glanced nervously at Fett, “bring up a sore point. But they know who I am now, and if I go back to Mos Pelgo, I could…” He trailed off, frowning.

“You could lead them to your people,” Din finished for him. He thought of Cobb, looking back over their shoulder as they went out into the desert, and tried very hard not to think of the empty Covert he had found on Nevarro.

“Yeah.” Cobb swallowed hard. “I can’t do that. Besides,” he continued, seeming to rally himself, “it’s like I said. Tattooine’s my planet, and we can’t let the Imps come back.”

“I don’t think anyone’s ever been that loyal to Tattooine before,” Fennec said, tilting her head back against the wall. “Congratulations, you’re one of a kind.”

“Well…” Cobb looked at her, narrowing his eyes like he wasn’t sure whether he was being mocked and also wasn’t sure whether he’d survive saying something about it if he was. “Thanks, I guess.”

“What about you two?” Din asked. “Want a lift back to Tattooine?”

“It’ll probably be a little hot there for us, for a bit. At least for me,” Fennec said.

“Best to steer clear until things calm down,” Fett agreed. “We’ll need something else to do in the meantime, and giving the Empire enough hell that they don’t cross our turf again seems like a good option.”

Din noticed the thinness of the explanation. A man like Fett, and a woman like Fennec, could get by on Tattooine even under Imperial eyes, and they all knew it. He didn’t point it out, though. He just attempted to swallow past a sudden tightness in his throat and turned to look at Mayfeld, who was attempting to figure out the caf maker and apparently paying no attention to the conversation.

“Don’t look at me,” he said when he noticed the direction of Din’s glance. “I haven’t shot nearly enough Imps to be satisfied yet. You’re stuck with me.”

“So you’ve got a bounty, and I’ve got a badge that says I need to keep the Republic safe from Imperial bullshit,” Cara finished. “Looks like we’re all in. One big happy family.”

“That’s nice and all,” Fennec said, “but what is the next step?”

“Go through what we downloaded from the bank, I assume,” Cara answered.

“That won’t take us much time,” Fett said, grimacing. “I got some before that EMP pulse took out the computers, but not even a fraction of what we were hoping to get.”

“Well,” Cara said with a sigh, “it’s a start, at least. We can hope it tells us something interesting, something we can act on.”

“There might be something else,” Din said. “I planted a tracker.”

“On one of the ships?” Cara asked, her eyebrows raised. “How’d you manage that?”

Din shook his head. “Not on one of the ships.” He hoped his grin wasn’t audible in his voice. He imagined he looked pretty silly under his helmet. “Up Slate’s sleeve.”

***

Din had retreated to the cockpit, trying to stay out of the way of all of the other people who were suddenly on his ship. It made him feel antsy and strange; he had a newfound appreciation for Fett letting a bunch of strangers camp out in Slave One on only Din’s word.

In his hands, he held a receiver that was scanning space in ever wider arcs, looking for the signal of the transmitter he’d planted on Slate’s clothing. He had no idea how long it would take to find the signal, had no idea where Slate would have gone after Tattooine, had no idea how long it would take Slate to realize that Din had added something to his wardrobe. There were so many uncertainties. All he could do was hope that something good would come of it.

He heard footsteps outside the door of the cockpit. He wasn’t very surprised when Cara came in and sat down in the copilot’s seat beside him.

“Hi,” she said, stretching her arms over her head.

“How’s the data from the bank computers?” Din asked.

“Fett and Fennec are working on it at the moment,” Cara answered. “We actually got more than Fett had expected, but we won’t be able to go through it for about an hour or so. By that time we should have arrived. Any luck here?”

Din frowned. “Probably about that much time to track down the signal. Space is big.”

Cara laughed. “Yeah, it sure is.” 

There was a silence between them, for a moment, but it was a comfortable silence, so Din said the thing he’d been thinking since his companions had rescued him in Mos Chanda. “You remembered my name.”

“Huh?”

“My name. You remembered it. From the fight in the bar on Nevarro.”

Cara laughed. “Of course I remembered your name. Idiot.” She glanced at Din out of the corner of her eyes. “Are you okay?”

Din shrugged. “I’m not injured.”

Cara snorted. “Yeah, okay. Nice evade. Seriously, are you okay?”

Din considered his options. He could just say that he was fine. Cara would take that answer, even if she didn’t believe him.

Instead, he said, “He’s a Mandalorian.”

“Who is?”

“Slate.”

“He… Really?”

“Yeah,” he answered, and took a breath. Slow, in and out. “The only one I know of now, besides Bo-Katan and her people.”

“I’m sorry,” Cara said softly.

They sat in silence for a while, watching hyperspace go by. Din had heard stories that people went insane if they stared at hyperspace too long. There was something hypnotic about it. It made his mind go blank, comfortably quiet.

Finally, he said, “I don’t regret saving the kid. Obviously. But I… I wasn’t there. When my people were attacked. I should have been there.”

Another long silence followed, before Cara said, “Would it piss you off if I said I knew exactly how you feel?”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Din answered, ducking his head. It was strangely difficult to look away from the lights flashing by beyond the ship’s window. “I know you do.”

“I was on vacation, when it happened to me.” Cara shook her head. “On fucking vacation.”

Din wondered what the right response was. He imagined that there were people out there who just knew how to give it, no matter what the situation was. 

He didn’t have that ability. He took a guess and asked, “What happened?”

“I…” Cara sighed, started over. “I was nineteen. I’d gotten good scores on my exams, and my parents wanted me to go to the agricultural school in the capitol, maybe take over their farm one day. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to join the Rebellion. I thought about it all the time, being a rebel hero. I was so young and dumb. It was all any of the people my age on Alderaan could talk about.”

“What did your parents do?”

“They’d saved up some money, to get me a present to celebrate my exam scores. They decided to send me on a tour of the other Core worlds. I think they were hoping that I’d see everything that was available, everything I could do, and decide that living under the Empire wasn’t ideal but it was still doable. That’s the way they’d always thought about it.” Din turned his head to look at her; she was still staring out at hyperspace, her eyes narrowed and blinking frequently. He looked away again, to give her the space to continue if she wanted to. After a moment, she did. “I was on Coruscant when I heard the rumors. At first everyone just said there’d been an attack on Alderaan, and I was pissed off, but I wasn’t worried. I assumed they’d just hit the capitol, maybe some other cities, and my parents and my little brother lived out in the country. It wasn’t until a couple days later that the Empire put out the official propaganda bulletin and…” She stopped abruptly with a huff of breath.

“You saw it was all gone,” Din murmured. He remembered when he had found out what had happened to Alderaan, everyone standing around the Covert in groups, talking in low voices, everyone tense, everyone angry. Some had wept in their own rooms, the memories it brought up too much to bear. The sound was carefully ignored by everyone else. Din had gone to the Armorer’s foundry, where he always went when he was unsure what to think of something, and found her working a piece of beskar with quick, angry strokes.

“They did it again,” she’d said to him, or maybe just to the air. “They did it again, to someone else. They won’t ever stop.”

Din remembered, too, the yawning emptiness of the Covert on Nevarro, when he’d returned. The silence, and the feeling as though he was being dropped from a great height.

_ They won’t ever stop _ .

Din reached his hand toward Cara, and after a moment, she took it. The lights of hyperspace played over the control panel, and the weight of lost homes pressed onto Din’s shoulders.

It was an easier weight to bear, with her there. With her understanding.

He thought of Slate’s words, the gleam in his eyes, the deep roots of the Emperor’s plans. He wanted to go back to being a bounty hunter, a simple man who kept his head down and did his job and didn’t get involved in the sorts of big conflicts that destroyed planets. 

_ They won’t ever stop _ .

“Whatever they’re doing,” he said quietly, “we have to stop them.”

Cara didn’t say anything, but she squeezed his hand, and that was answer enough.


End file.
